Choices
by Snowflames
Summary: Life is a series of multiple choices. Love, friendship, victory, all choices to be made, all results of such choices. This is a tale of such choices.
1. Chapter 1

**I: Lolita Nun on the Balcony**

**Author's Note:**

Hello and welcome to a new edition of madness with Snowflames! Today, I present to you, a curious insert into To Aru Majutsu no Index or as the plebes call it, A Certain Magical Index.

Explore with me the changes that would be made if a certain Shimura Ryou were in play. Don't bother looking him up; he exists nowhere but here.

* * *

Life is a series of multiple-choice questions. Someone told me that line before. I don't remember who, though; it must've been my parents or someone close like them. Our choices shape our past, our present, and our future; choose poorly, and we find ourselves in some precarious situations.

My neighbor, Kamijou Touma, faced one of these choices.

Oh, did I forget to introduce myself? The name is Shimura Ryou; my dorm room, like one certain Tsuchimikado, was adjacent to that spiky head's. I attended the same high school as he did in Academy City, and we were in the same class.

Touma's one of the few people I classify as my friend; that is, I can trust him to watch my back. I called him "spiky"; it was because of his perpetually disheveled hair. He's nothing but trouble, though. His bad luck permeates everywhere and affects everyone around him, making himself somewhat of a trouble magnet, and I have had to deal with his troubles many, many times in the past. That one time, though, it was different. It was July 20th, and the day was very, very hot, I remember; the power went out the night earlier. If I had to guess, it was probably the result of one of his wild adventures, but I never asked anything about his personal life. He never asked me uncomfortable questions, after all.

Well, I was kind of well prepared for a power outage, I suppose; the fridge I had had nothing but drinks and alcohol in it, and I had a fan at my bedside. Still, the heat of the sun was enough to turn the dorm rooms into sauna baths. It was after I took a cold-water shower and was wiping my head, when I heard the sound of explosive diarrhea in his bathroom.

His door was never locked for some reason; besides, I had a backup key for him in case his rotten luck caused him to forget or lose his keys. So, I remember going into his room with some pills and asking quite loudly "did you eat something strange again, Spiky" when I saw this little European girl sitting at the table.

I'm never going to forget how she looked at the time. She was sitting, but I could estimate her height and she would be just barely hitting five feet tall. She got a head of silver hair; the way they reflected sunlight almost blinded me. She was wearing a white set of nun's garb with gold accents; they appeared to be made out of silk or some similar material because of the way they reflect sunlight.

I remember thinking that she was the result of one of his other wild adventures. All the while, I hear Touma suffering in the bathroom trying to empty his bowels into the toilet. There was a bowl of mixed vegetable salad on the ground. It was probably the cause of his involuntary stomach spasms, because they smelled rotten.

"I'm still hungry." The nun said, "And he snatched that bowl away before I could finish it..."

Well, that certainly wouldn't do, leaving the lady hungry after a night of adventure. Speaking of which, I never knew he was into girls her age. I sighed and made two packs of instant ramen I had; the girl was slurping down the bowl of "food" like it was her last meal, even drinking the last drop of soup before patting her stomach and letting out a burp of satisfaction.

Touma stumbled out of the bathroom, looking drained. He must've tried to toss together a salad with spoiled vegetables and fed it to the girl before his guilt made him eat the rest. He's still as easy to read as he was at that moment.

"Oh, Ryouko-chan, you're here. What's up?" My facial muscles twitched. So I had a rather feminine face with a head of silky long hair tied into a ponytail; what was the big deal with being androgynous? He still calls me that, by the way; I've wanted to punch his face into a bloody pulp a long time ago, but I'm no match against him in a fist fight and I don't want to kill him... yet.

I had a better comeback. I crossed my arms, sitting at the table as I was: "I couldn't sleep last night because your bed was bumping against the damn wall, so I was wondering if you were doing well."

He couldn't take the dig, as ever; his face turned beet red right then, even though both of us knew that my accusation simply wasn't true: "There wasn't any hump—I mean, bang—damn it, I mean bumping! There wasn't! Seriously, I don't get how the hell you come up with these things!"

"Oh? Then, how'd you explain this little lady here?" I gestured to the nun, who was then munching on a bag of oatmeal cookies I brought from my room along with the ramen. "I never knew you're into young girls. It's kind of illegal, too."

"What the hell are you thinking, you big pervert!?" I smirked at his reactions to my dig. It's always been fun to tease him, and since I've known him ever since we were 16, I know how to tease him. "I was bringing my blankets out to dry, and she was just there on the railings of my balcony and screamed 'FEED ME, FEED ME' so I had to take her in!"

"So the power outage last night was her fault, too?"

"No, that's separate."

"Little Miss Sparkles?"

"Yuuuuup." His face twisted into an ugly grimace.

"What are you guys talking about?" The girl spoke. Her voice was much like what one would expect from a junior high school girl; it was a soft, high-pitched squeak and, for someone of European descent, her Japanese was fluent to the degree of having no discernable accent.

"It's nothing." Touma wanted to turn the page already. His encounters with Little Miss Sparkles would always involve the destruction of something. This time, it was the city's power grid.

"So, why don't you tell us about yourself?" Making fun of him could wait. As much as I liked poking fun at him, I could do that any time. Having a stranger show up on the railing of his balcony and asking for food was not something that could happen every day. "What's your name? Where are you from? What were you doing on his balcony of all places?"

"I fell!" The girl protested at my questions, as if I was suggesting that she was trying to burgle the place. "I was hopping from roof to roof and running from the magicians after me, and I fell!"

Magicians?

"Anyway." She cleared her throat with her tiny little fist in front of her mouth like a professor trying to give a lecture, "My name is Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I'm from the Protestant Church in England. Thank you for feeding me."

Well, at least she had some manners. Index Librorum Prohibitorum roughly translates into "the Catalogue of Banned Books"; it was a concept used in the Roman Catholic Church to prohibit the spread of certain books by certain authors because they would apparently "taint the body and corrupt the spirit". If I remembered correctly, the works of Descartes, Pascal, Galilei, Copernicus, Kepler, and other great scientists of the Renaissance period made the list at one point or another.

Why did I know all of that? Did I tell you that I like to read things about science? Yeah, I was that kind of kid that would shut himself in the library all day and read about all kinds of things. I was kind of a loner, too; I was just too weird for people my age to really connect to. I didn't listen to the crap they called "pop music", I didn't watch TV other than to get the news, and I didn't like the rowdy atmosphere in clubs and parties. Yeah, I was pretty weird as a kid.

"So, why exactly were you being chased, Miss Index?" Touma asked. That guy could ask some sensible questions once in a while.

"I think they want the 103000 grimoires I carry." The girl answered with a slight smile. Was it pride? I couldn't read her well enough, but I did know that she had just made an outlandish claim.

A hundred and three thousand grimoires would take up enough space to warrant a building; we usually called that building "the library". On the other hand, that library could probably cram ten thousand Indexes in it if she were packed in there like sardines in a can.

"I carry the Moonchild, the Lemegeton, the Necronomicon, and a variety of other books." She was dead serious when she was talking about preposterous things. I wished we took her seriously at the moment, but hindsight's always 20/20, they say.

"Uh, slow down a second. Moonchild, as in the book by Aleister Crowley the occultist?" I remembered the name of the book. I read about Crowley a couple of times, too; he was a little insane, I remembered.

"Yup! The great wizard, Aleister Crowley! He's the greatest wizard of history, you know!" Index was grinning as if my words were simply confirming hers. "I remember every word he wrote in that book!"

Well, I didn't read the Moonchild, so I couldn't just say "hey, you recite a passage and I'll check if it's correct", so I asked the next best question: "Well, putting aside the words. You don't have a single book on you, do you? How are we supposed to believe what you said?"

"I remember them. I have photographic memory. These are terrible items of great power; carrying them around is simply too risky." Eidetic memory, huh; I read about those a while back. Apparently some people in the city had powers related to that, as well, so I couldn't simply dismiss it off hand. If so, she had got to be very, very knowledgeable about the "grimoires" she carried.

"Speaking of which, you said you were being chased." Touma added. I almost forgot about that.

"Yup. From people in magic cabals. They want what's in my head, and they're willing to do everything to get it."

And then, Touma and I stared at her like she was an idiot.

"Um, uh, are they like, cults?" That was the only thing Touma managed to squeak out.

"We're going to need proof to believe that one, Index." I couldn't believe it either; the claim was simply too outlandish to believe without further confirmation.

"Well, there is the Walking Church, the garment I'm wearing." She scratched her chin a little in thought. "It replicates the effect of the Shroud of Turin, and protects me from the majority of attacks." She then scurried off to the kitchen and retrieved a sharp knife: "How about slashing me and see if I get hurt?"

At that point, we had to make a choice. I should first explain how Academy City works, but I suppose most of that would be common knowledge that doesn't really need repeating. It's a city of espers, people with supposedly supernatural powers. Touma's power is the Imagine Breaker, the power to negate any supernatural powers; he's a living counter spell. I, on the other hand, had a different power that I went to great lengths to conceal but could ultimately not keep it under wraps.

For every choice I'd make, I could read at most seven steps ahead. What is life but an endless stream of multiple choices questions? By that logic, you could say that I could predict the future, but that is not entirely true; what I can see is the choices at hand and the immediate consequences of the specific options after they are selected. For example, I could read three moves ahead with my ability alone in chess, because I can predict four choices that I'd make and three choices that my opponent would make.

Reading seven steps into the future is difficult. Given the number of choices and the number of branches spawned from each selection, the number of possible outcomes grow exponentially as I go deeper into the decision tree. Often, it would grow so large and the possible outcomes so numerous that the analysis process would consume the processing power of all but the most basic life support functions of my brain. And they weren't any vague answers, either; the outcomes are very, very specific. I knew exactly what would happen if I continue down a certain path.

Anyway. It-my ability, that is-told me that stabbing her would be all right. The kitchen knife wouldn't even scratch the fabric, and she would never get hurt from any attack with a kitchen knife.

But Touma wasn't buying it. Just as I was busy reading the decision tree, he was proudly declaring his ability to Index, and-what a surprise-Index wasn't buying it either. Eventually, they decided if the Walking Church bursts into tiny little pieces when Touma's right hand would touch it, Touma would believe her.

And he was really going to do it.

"Uh, let's not do that." I caught Touma's right wrist as he was about to slap Index on the shoulder. The robe was really going to rip into itty bitty little pieces after Touma would touch it, and I had a feeling that Index was going to need the robe's protection later.

"What's up, Ryouko? Don't tell me you believe her!"

"Wow, Spiky, you read my mind. This isn't going to end well for you, you know." I said, my grip still tight on his wrist. Unlike me, he was an unabashed idiot; he wasn't going to believe Index's claims until he saw it with his own eyes.

"I'm not going to believe her outlandish claims And like that, his right hand pressed onto her anyway after it wrenched free from my grip. And things happened much as I'd expected. Index got undressed explosively, and Touma got dozens of bite marks on him.

I have to say, that girl did have some fire in her. She attacked much as you'd expect: like a cute little puppy with rabies. The way she opened her mouth was impressive, too; I never thought that a human mouth could open wide enough to completely engulf Touma's hand, and his hands were pretty big when he was 16. And Touma, well, he held up pretty well while he was under attack from a naked nun with rabies. I almost thought he'd punch her, but he didn't.

The more surprising thing was that... she wasn't wearing anything underneath. Given her figure at that time, I could retroactively see why. Well, you see, in that situation, I had to... I mean, I couldn't avoid seeing everything, all right? Let's move on.

So the fight ended with complete victory from Index's part. As she was busy repairing her "Walking Church" while wearing a bedsheet, I was going over Touma's wounds. The bite marks were all superficial, thankfully; if she drew blood from biting him, I would really be worried.

"See, I told you, it won't end well for you." I sat opposite to him and sighed. "So, now that you've been bitten and scratched and everything, you believe her?"

"... Yeah. You could've stopped me, you know."

"Me, getting into that thick skull of yours? No way, man." I chuckled, "Not unless I got a hammer and some nails."

"And I'm to be ignored like the crazy person I am, I suppose." I could see the dark cloud looming over Index's cloud as she played with a box of safety pins. The Walking Church was completely obliterated. I offered her some clothes to wear in the meantime; specifically, a shirt that would look ridiculous on her. Every piece of clothing Touma and I had was oversized for such a petite woman like Index and, being the stubborn person that she was,

"Well, you're kind of busy now," I said with a small smile. "So, what are you going to do after you fix your... dress?"

"Um... I think I should leave." She smiled and hopped off of Touma's bed. The box of safety pins was empty and her gown glittered from the sunlight reflecting off of the many scores of safety pins embedded in it. "I can't stay here for long. The Walking Church had a magic signature, and my pursuers can track it to where I am right now."

"But..."

"You wouldn't want your room blown up, right?" Her smile was serene in the face of Touma's objection. She hopped for the door, the stiff dress hindering her movement somewhat.

"Wait." I gestured, getting up from the ground. Touma did, too, but his bad luck once again struck as he stumbled and stepped on his cell phone. Though it was a dumb phone and costs next to nothing to replace, it would still be an unnecessary expense for him, who just happened to have his cash card destroyed earlier this morning with the same foot.

She turned her head and threw me an inquisitive stare, wondering what I was about to do. Well, when Touma stepped on his phone, my plan went out the window, so...

"Where are you going to go?" Touma took over like I knew he would. His heart was too big to let a little girl walk out on the street with a dress that made straitjackets look sane. "I can't let you leave like this! What if people attack you when you are searching for a place to stay?"

"Then, would you like to walk with me into Hell itself?"

"Oh, c'mon, not this melodramatic stuff again" was what I thought at that time. I didn't know just how close to reality that statement was. Regardless, neither Touma nor I had an answer for that question, and when we did, Index had already disappeared down the hall, being chased by a trio of cleaning robots as she went.

"Choices, choices." I sighed and wrapped my arm around Touma. "What are you going to do?"

"It's not like I can follow her around all day. I'm late for my supplemental classes, so I guess I'll go there..." He sighed, putting on his shoes as he did. "I'm going to get punished if I don't do well."

"Knowing Komoe, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. And knowing how you attract lolitas, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, either." I teased, pushing him out the door. "I'll deal with the cleaning up; just be on your way already."

Really, there were too many choices to make.

* * *

My ability certainly was convenient during my student years. Thanks to that, I avoided many an uncomfortable supplemental session with our teacher, Miss Komoe, and was then allowed to roam free in the City during summer holidays.

Komoe was a strange creature, now that I thought about it. She wasn't a dwarf or anything, no; she was, by all means, a normal human being who happened to stop physically growing in every direction when she hit 12 years old. Her mannerisms were consistent with a 12-year-old as well, except that the words that spilled forth from that Lolita mouth of hers were difficult enough to require an entire dictionary and a couple stacks of academic papers to interpret. And said creature was one of the only people that could really talk to me on an intellectually equal level, seeing how I spent my days in the library.

The other person that I enjoy talking to is, bizarrely enough, Little Miss Sparkles; that was the nickname I had for a middle-schooler named Misaka Mikoto. See, she wasn't the type to spend her days and nights in a library like I did, but she worked hard in her own way. Climbing from Level 1 to Level 5 wasn't easy; that was probably why there was only one person in the entire city that did it, and namely it was her. Also, there was something about her that was intriguing, but at that time I couldn't put my fingers on it.

And the meeting places she chose had to be in a park. I hate big, open spaces: too many tactical approaches for assassins and not enough cover. Sure, I may have sounded like a paranoid mad man just then, but you never know; if it weren't an assassin, it might just be some random esper blowing stuff up and causing trouble.

"Thanks for meeting me today on such short notice. Let me buy you a drink. It's quite hot today, after the power outage you caused last night." I said, standing in front of the vending machine and fumbling my pockets for some loose change. That was another thing that absolutely puzzled me: in the age of credit cards and chip cards, the vending machines here still only accepted coins! Not even bills! Damn coins!

"Your neighbour pissed me off, damn it. It's not like it's my fault!" She pouted, standing behind me with her arm crossed and tapping her foot impatiently. I didn't get it back then, you know; her tendency of pushing faults on others around her. Honestly, it irked me a little, knowing that she was the one who couldn't control her temper.

"That so?" I finally found enough change to feed that infernal machine for two drinks; imagine my fury when the drinks actually jammed it. If my stare could kill, the machine would've been dead a million times then. "Oh, son of a bitch! Did his rotten luck infect me, too!?"

"What's up?" She asked inquisitively. Standing behind me, she leaned over and watched me fondle the object in frustration. "The drinks getting stuck in the machine?"

"Yeah." I growled and slammed my fists on the contraption from Hell. "How the hell is a machine like this still in service!? I wonder how much money it ate."

"Not from me, it hasn't eaten any. Move over." She shoved me aside with a push, and hopped in place. I sighed; I knew exactly what she was going to do even without using my ability, and it... well, it unnerved me a little. I hoped that she wouldn't shut down a dozen city blocks just because she couldn't get a drink from a vending machine.

Unlike what I expected-which was to shock the machine into obedience-she lifted her leg and gave it a spinning kick with a loud yell, her tibia in full contact with the side of the machine. The boom and the yell were loud enough for the people outside the park to hear, I was certain. The machine rattled as it wobbled from its stand; it was a wonder how she could make something that weighed at least 200 kilograms lift a couple of centimeters off the ground.

I'd hate to be on the receiving end of that kick, I shuddered. With a string of clacking sounds, two cans of soft drinks sauntered out of the machine; they were followed by a dozen of their brethren, presumably all stuck there because some unfortunate people placed their faith in a piece of junk like this.

"Ooh, bonus points!" Mikoto's eyes lit up as she picked the cans up with her power. They suspended around her, before neatly stacking up to a small pyramid on top of her school bag, which she held out nicely like a temporary tray. "You want one?"

"Yeah, I'll take one." She tossed me a can of coke. I opened it carefully; the content of the can was under high pressure, after all. Taking a long draw from the can, I let the bubbles tickle my throat and the coolness of the liquid seep into my neck. A cold drink on a hot day really is the best thing in the world; that fact never change with time.

"So, about the thing I asked you earlier; you found out anything more about it?" She leaned against the machine, which then had a leg-shaped dent on its side. My burning question would be how her leg managed to stay intact after such a titanic impact, but I'd rather not keep a woman like that waiting.

"About Level Upper?" It was an investigation that her friends at Judgment were digging through; apparently, there was something that could cause abilities to go well above and beyond what had been reported in System Scans. She asked me to look into it, thinking that she bribed me with a dinner date at a classy restaurant in her bourgeois district.

In truth, I didn't need any money. A moderate lottery ticket win a month was enough to cover my expenses and even give me some savings. The number's stacked up over the years, and thank God for offshore accounts and blind trusts. Nobody complained about it; I was careful and discretionary with its use, so there wasn't any concrete evidence that I actually cheated.

"Well, yeah, I did some searches on the internet." I replied before deciding against sitting on the park bench. They were painted dark green for some reason and I could see light distorting from the heat they emanated. "Best I can tell, it's some new fad within us Level 0s. Promise of power without discernable sacrifices; I can see how well that's going to go."

"Remember the guy I told you about, the Graviton Explosion guy? He's in a coma." She emptied a can of drink in one breath, before letting out a loud burp. "So, that's the sacrifice for what seemed to be a significant temporary boost in his abilities."

From my personal experiences, the cause of a person slipping into a coma with no apparent reason would be that something took up the processing power of that brain. Given that esper abilities are actually acutely linked to said processing power, maybe someone in the city had figured out a way of ferrying processing power from one person to another to provide temporary boosts of power, and Level Upper was the way to facilitate; that was my theory at the time.

"Well, maybe someone's establishing a network of brain power and balancing someone's extra brain power to some other person to give them a power boost?" I had no idea just how close I got on pure conjecture. Of course, I couldn't tell Mikoto just how I came to that conclusion either, but posturing it as a wild guess would probably get her interested.

"You think so, huh?" She was in thought. "Well, that's... a little bit out there, but it's not exactly impossible."

"I think outside the box whenever I can. Besides, I don't think I'm the right guy to ask; I have connections, but I don't have the clearance your Judgment friends have." I smiled, taking a sip of my coke. The incident had officially piqued my curiosity: if someone could do that, then they could, theoretically, create a biological distributed computing network. By spreading computing tasks to all those people in coma, the controller could achieve some impressive feats and maybe even gain abilities on par of a Level 5.

"Well, independent verification never hurts." She shrugged, "Besides, I didn't like asking Kuroko for favors. Asking her for favors is like asking the Yakuza; I'm probably going to pay for it one way or another later."

"And what makes you think that you wouldn't need to pay anything for my services later?" Amusing. I had always known that her friend Kuroko would love to get more intimate with her than with what she was comfortable; she talked about Kuroko a lot more than she realized.

"Hey, I got you the drinks, didn't I?" She tossed me another can, seemingly not worried about whatever payment I would try to extort from her. There was a good reason for that: "Besides, unlike your damn neighbor, I could pretty much tase you before you could do anything to me."

Touma, huh. "I detect a little frustration in there, Sparky."

"... It's nothing." She waved dismissively, but then she changed her mind. Playing with her short locks of hair, she averted her eyes from me before speaking again, "well, it's just that... how could he survive a full-on blast from me? He's a level 0 and I'm a Level 5, for goodness sakes! Unless I got weaker and weaker, it shouldn't happen."

Well, what can I say? She's had confidence problems in the past. "Well," I said, leaning against a tree in the shade with my legs crossed, "I wouldn't think too much about it."

"How can I not think about it, though? His survival defies all logic." She looked at me, seemingly incredulous. It did defy all logic, except that she had no idea what Touma's arm did. If my reasoning skills were worth their salt, Touma blocked every one of her attacks with his right arm. Hell, if an idiot had my information, they'd come to the same conclusion.

"Hey, you shut down the entire city trying to kill him last night." I wasn't the one to go out and gossip about people like some immature girl that liked to yap. If Spiky hadn't told her about it, I sure wasn't going to spoil it for her. "That fact alone should give you some confidence, because it's not something a Level 4 can do."

"Still. How the hell did he survive?" She stroked her chin, seemingly accepting my words as a possible answer. "Don't you know anything about that? You're his neighbor, after all."

"You know, it's not like we sleep together at night," I teased, "I bet you thought we get all hot and bothered every night with each other."

"Well, it's not exactly an impossibility, what with how you looked..." She eyed me with a sly smile. I had to admit, I set myself up for that one. "I wonder how he could restrain yourself when he looks at you."

"Neither one of us bends that way," The conversation took a turn down the uncomfortable lane. "You know, I thought Kuroko would've done something to you already given that you two sleep in the same room."

"Eh, I zap her if she tries to do anything funny. I can handle myself." She shrugged. "But, tell me already! There must be a secret behind his survival!"

"Well, I'm not about to be the person spilling the beans." I smiled and fished even more interest from her. It was working; she was leaning forward and staring at me with starry eyes, and she was about to jump on me for information.

"You know something, don't you? Why don't you tell me, damn it!?" She pouted, sparks flying off of her forehead. She was getting ready to shock me.

"Torture is just going to make me make stuff up to make the pain stop." Somehow, the number of times I used "make" in that sentence bothered me a little. Well, it bothered me to the degree that I forgot to read what she was going to do next.

"Who said I was going to zap you?" Liar. She was just about to tase me. She latched onto me, completely unabashed, and squeezed and stretched my cheeks. "Spill it! Spill it!" She pouted, her body rubbing against mine as she squirmed while we struggled.

"Oi, I can't talk properly with your hand tearing my cheeks apart!" I struggled to shove her off of me, but somehow my muscles were not listening to me. It's a trick that she would use many times and that I would figure out how it worked exactly later: she sent small electric currents into my nerves and actually drowned out the signals my brain sent. It felt a bit like how the legs would feel after sitting a long time on the toilet; it was a tingling numbness, one that was extremely uncomfortable and renders my limbs almost useless.

"If you don't tell me, I'm really going to zap you!" Really, she seemed a little cute when she did that.

"Weren't you the one who said she's not going to zap me like 15 seconds ago!?" She slid off of my body like a slippery eel and stood triumphantly with her hands on her hips in front of me. Her face had such a proud look that it made her seem a little childish; it reminded me of how I looked myself when I managed to get into Academy City.

"So..." I took a deep breath and felt my arms come back to me. "You really want to know?"

"Yeah!" She nodded enthusiastically. Well, I could just make something up and sate her curiosity with a lie and she wouldn't know. Of course, that was not taking into account the possibility of Touma bludgeoning my lie into itty bitty little pieces when he would decide to let the cat out on his own. And knowing that her wrath would indeed be terrible, I wasn't sure if I'd take the chance.

"Why don't I take you out to lunch and we'll discuss that in detail?" My stomach growled. It was almost noon, and getting out of the park was my top priority seeing how it was being turned into a giant pit of fire under the midday sun.

"You're asking me out on a date, now?" She smiled slyly, folding her arms under her chest and rubbed her chin. "Well, I am a little hungry, and it's about lunch time, so..."

It was then that her cell phone rang. She picked it up and shifted uncomfortably as she listened to whoever was speaking on the phone, before ending the conversation with a quiet snap: "Well, seems like I'll have to take a rain check. We're going to check up with Kiyama Harumi on this Level Upper business; you wanna come?"

Kiyama Harumi. I remembered her being a researcher in the Advanced Education Department. I also remembered reading a paper from her on AIM field dispersion. It was interesting but only mildly; my own theoretical knowledge in AIM fields in general was quite weak.

Something told me that going there wouldn't give me much more than what I already postulated. That same instinct-my ability-told me that I was dangerously close to the truth. I just needed to find out who the culprit was and why they were doing this.

"I'm going to pass on this." I waved in dismissal, getting up from my leaning position against a tree. "It's probably best if I look into this a little bit on my own. I'll contact you if I get any new intel. Call me if you need anything."

"Okay. I'll let you know if we know anything more on our end." Was she a little disappointed that our so-called "date" was not going to happen? If she was, she concealed it awfully well considering the skills she had in that department was severely lacking. "The drinks are on me this time. Next time, you're paying."

"Didn't I pay this time, too?"

"Yeah, but you're getting all the extras for free." She grinned like a mischievous cat. "Oh, by the way, if you're packing heat, make sure the cops don't catch you."

"Yeah, yeah; you don't have to remind me every chance you get." My back tingled. It was where I placed my .22 pistol under my very loose T-shirt in a small concealed carry holster. My ability, though handy, was never meant to be used offensively. Having a pistol never hurt my safety. Academy City's firearm control policies were strict, but it was not without loopholes. Each one of my weapons I had when I was in Academy City had a story; this particular one involved, if I remember correctly, a couple of Skill-Out goons, a bunch of Anti-Skill soldiers, and Mikoto herself.

"I'll see you around." She turned around, her skirt just lifting barely to see the edge of the sports trunk she wore underneath. I was in puberty; asking me not to pay attention to a girl's skirt was too much.

Really, back then, I thought I needed to make new friends.

* * *

I've always enjoyed my time in a library. Academy City, being a city of, well, academics and students, was littered with libraries and cafes here and there: two of my favorite establishments to frequent. With the advent of electronics, I could even pull material from other libraries in the comfort of the seat I sat in. Besides, air conditioning was a god-send in the scorching heat of summer.

But all good times come to an end. The sun was sinking below the horizon, and my stomach was grumbling again, so I left. It was good timing, too; my phone buzzed as soon as I stepped out of the library.

The humid heat of Academy City assaulted me as I pulled out my phone. Contrary to most people in Academy City who ran on flip phones or some other sturdy but less modern accessories, I had a smartphone. As technology marched on, I found the processing power of a smartphone be most beneficial when I was on the move, because it allowed me access to streams of information otherwise inaccessible while I was outside. Of course, the battery life of a smartphone was painfully short compared to the dumber phones the rest of them had, but I could always count on there being a charging station somewhere nearby. Academy City was the most advanced city in the world, after all.

It turned out that Little Miss Sparkles called me, so I answered: "Yeah?"

"Hey, Ryou." She sounded a little upset. Her chat with Kiyama wasn't pleasant, apparently.

Speaking of Kiyama, I did a bit of research on her and read a couple more of her papers while I was in the library. She was a teacher in her early years at the Advanced Education Department, an orphanage of sorts for Child Errors. Child Errors were, for all intents and purposes, wards of the state; they were abandoned by their parents in Academy City, and there were no one that took care of them. The list of children that were in her care was, however, curiously classified, as were most of her records while she was employed at the Advanced Education Department.

That wasn't the only thing that was fishy. After her transfer to the AIM Analytic Research Center, she requested the use of the Tree Diagram-the advanced supercomputer Academy City sent into orbit-twenty-three times. Tree Diagram was a supercomputer with human-like cognitive capacity, able to run simulations on a vast scale; one of the many uses for such a powerful computer was to accurately predict the weather. She needed the processing power of Tree Diagram for something, and her requests were either pocket-denied by not being reviewed or actively denied on trivial grounds. The seemingly persistent and urgent need for such large amount of processing power and the denials by the administration staff made everything around her smell like an entire shipping container packed with rotting sardines.

"Yeah, I'm here." I answered. She was probably not ready for my conclusions just yet; after she confirmed my hypotheses, I'd spring more of these on her, and she'd be more inclined to believe me.

"Well, from what we've got from Kiyama..." She seemed to shudder at the utterance of that name. I wondered What exactly she saw and heard when she talked to Kiyama. "It's possible to replicate the effect of Testament on individuals with a recording, and that was what Level Upper is; it's just a recording."

"Hmm. Testament is the machine they use to try and open up abilities, right?" So, Kiyama didn't tell her anything about the network, or anything related to Kiyama's past herself. It confirms more suspicions, but that alone was not enough concrete evidence for me to persuade her and Judgment to act.

"Yeah," She paused. "Other than that, we don't have many leads. What about things on your end? Did you find anything?"

"Did you tell her about my guesses?"

"No." I let out a long breath of relief. If Kiyama was indeed the perpetrator and the distributor of Level Upper, she would come after me personally if it was indeed her purpose. In such a confrontation, I would most likely perish. Dead people don't speak, after all.

I liked living enough that I wasn't going to throw away my life; at least, not for this: "Yeah, okay. Keep it to yourself for a bit longer. I'd like to find more evidence to validate it before I want to make it known."

"Sure."

"And, if you see Touma again today, don't try and fight him, all right?" I hardly wanted another city-wide blackout that left everyone in suffocating humidity for the night. One night like that was enough. "Just... take it easy. It wouldn't end well for either of you if you fight again..."

"Yeah, whatever-Hold it right there! Hey!" She suddenly screamed on the phone before it was snapped shut. I remember rubbing my forehead and sighing; nobody took my advice seriously back then.

Walking past a burger joint, I decided to pick up a couple of burgers for Touma; his fridge of food was spoiled, after all, and he did step on his cash card in his scramble for food. It'd be a nice gesture, but I wouldn't want him to turn into a moocher of all things. Trouble seemed to follow him wherever he would go; having him leech off of me for food and supplies was just asking to become bankrupt.

So, imagine my shock when I walked in on a confrontation between him and a redhead smoker with a barcode tattooed over his face, right there in front of our dorm rooms.

"Oi, Spiky," I called, while casually walking toward the standoff. "Did you piss off somebody you shouldn't again?"

"This isn't a joking matter, Ryou. And I'm the one who's pissed off!" I arched an eyebrow at the way he referred to me. He normally wouldn't call me by my real name unless he was being very, very serious. I only understood why when I saw Index's bleeding body behind him; he was standing between the redhead and Index's body.

She was not dead. I knew that because she would end up dead in a dozen pathways of the decision tree only a couple of choices down the road. If she did not receive medical attention soon, she would be beyond saving, but apparently the redhead smoker did not intend to let that happen.

"Ryou, get her to the hospital. I'm going to teach this sorcerer wannabe a couple lessons he's not going to forget anytime soon," Touma ordered. The redhead smoker was at least two feet taller than he was, and the weirdo was apparently a mage. Index did say that mages from cabals were after her, so it wouldn't be crazy to assume that.

"Yeah, okay." It was one of the Hobson's choices that I had to make. The decision tree dictated that the redhead smoker would stop me from leaving, but I really had no choice. Sure enough, a wall of flames was lit in front of me, sealing off our exit.

"I didn't give you permission to leave," he said, his smile cocky as ever. The cigarette he lit was moving as he spoke, its dim red glow drawing random curves in the darkness.

"It's not like we need your permission to do anything," Touma readied his right hand. "Especially not to kick your sorry ass."

"Touma, take black." It was a code word, the source of which was chess. Moving first in this encounter was not advisable; neither side knew the capabilities of the other, and the first person to make a move would expose their abilities first and allow us to counterattack more efficiently.

Besides, none of us could afford to wait; Index was bleeding out in my arms, and I assumed that Mr. Barcode there wouldn't want her dead; a dead person couldn't say what she remembered, after all, and to him the grimoires in her head would be more valuable than a simple corpse.

"Hmph." Mr. Barcode scoffed with a sneer; he knew as well as I did the disadvantage of making the first move, and he was confident that Touma's patience would wear out first.

And, of course, he was right, because nobody ever listened to my advice in the beginning. Touma lunged at him, but Mr. Barcode saw it coming. He gingerly moved out of the way, standing then between us and Touma with his back to me.

This was the worst. I had no defense against Mr. Barcode if he would decide to roast me right there. But I could shoot him while his back was turned; a 22-caliber long rifle bullet could do some nasty things to an unarmored target like Mr. Barcode there up close at that range. It would at least hurt him badly enough that I could have a chance to dash away from him with Index in my arms and break for the stairs.

But all of the outcomes after "shoot him now" would end up in either my or Index's death. I didn't understand it at first, but looking back at it, I would have a very, very tough time avoiding Innocentius the King of Witch Hunters that Mr. Barcode would later summon. In fact, I wouldn't have made it out of the building before Innocentius roasted me into a nice rack of barbecued ribs. The only way of preventing that from happening was killing him with one shot. The shot would almost never be lethal unless I was extremely lucky and hit his femoral artery or some other major blood vessel; with my marksman skills, there existed a non-zero but infinitesimal chance of that happening.

So instead of shooting Barcode in the back, I held Index in my arms and tried to stop the bleeding. I remember the wound to this day as if it happened just moments ago. It was a slash wound likely made from some very sharp object: a sword, perhaps. The wound cut cleanly through her muscles and reached her organs; warm blood was spilling out of it without stopping. It was a wonder that she was still alive, and that status would change soon if nothing was done about it.

Barcode unleashed a wave of flames at Touma. He was quite cocky, too, that Barcode; he was saying something along the lines of "eh, with that kind of ability, you can't win against me no matter how many times you tried." So, imagine his shock when Touma emerged from that flame wave without a single scratch on him. The reactions were only natural, as even steel railings and ceiling lamps melt under such intense heat. If it were me who stood in front of him, I would've been cooked for sure.

"You sure about that, you son of a bitch?" Another wave of flames washed over Touma, and it was the same result. "Hell, what am I even afraid of? Wasn't it this hand right here that destroyed that robe?"

"Is that so... I see. That right hand defeated the Walking church. Curious..." Mr. Barcode muttered under his breath as if he had realized something. With a wave of his hand, he created a blast of flames out of nowhere.

"Out of my fuckin' way." Touma, being the headstrong idiot that he was, brushed away the flames. I could feel the searing heat radiating from that spell; metal objects around the flames melted and liquefied like ice cream in a pot of boiling water. It was a wonder that the ammunition in my pistol did not cook off on their own.

"Mannaz Tiwaz Wunjo Othala Tiwaz Fehu Fehu Tiwaz Othala!" Mr. Barcode read out his insanity mantra loudly in a booming voice as he created several more flame barriers between him and Touma, which, of course, Touma obliterated with ease. They were nothing but measures to buy time, anyway, as he continued to recite that mantra: "Isa Isa Berkano Othala Laguz Ansuz Isa Isa Othala Ehwaz, Isa Isa Mannaz Hagalaz Ansuz Isa Isa Berkano Othala Dagaz. Isa Isa Nauthiz Fehu Isa Isa Mannaz Sowilo.

"Isa Kenaz Algiz Mannaz Mannaz Berkano Gebo Perthro!" He was obviously doing something related to magic to release his innate power or strengthen his combat capabilities with that mantra of his; to me, that was a signal to high-tail it out of there with Index in tow. But I couldn't. What happened after that was too amazing, too extraordinary, too unearthly that I couldn't tear my attention away from it. The flames swirled and danced viciously, each ember moving to gather into a giant pillar of fire that screamed incoherently as if it were a person on fire. When the pillar actually formed blazing limbs, it occurred to me: that insanity mantra was indeed a spell, and it had just summoned a spirit of sorts.

"Behold! Innocentius, the King of Witch Hunters!" Mr. Redhead Barcode announced with what I assumed to be a smug smile. Bad guys always do that in movies and TVs when they assume they are unbeatable. Too bad; Touma would be able to defeat that thing easily.

But my assumption at that time was also wrong. As Touma's hand broke the pillar of burning hate, it reformed behind his back with a screech. His hand hurt it alright, but it wasn't enough to destroy it. Rather, it regenerated quickly enough that the hand's power wouldn't work on it; not without finding out the source of its regenerative abilities, anyway.

"You'll never defeat Innocentius with that hand of yours." Mr. Barcode turned around as a cross-shaped brand as large as the pillar of flames formed in Innocentius' hand. Touma had his back to me; he couldn't afford to split his attention for me, or he would be dead. "Now, then. If you don't want to get hurt, hand her over."

"I'm not handing over anyone." I had Index in my arms. She seemed to wince with every small movement I made. Concealed behind Index's frail body, my hand was already on the handle of my Ruger SR22, its safety off.

He rubbed his forehead as though he was dealing with kids in kindergarten: "Listen. I really don't want to kill you, and I'm assuming that you don't really want to die, so why don't you just hand her over and we'll all be on our way."

It was then that Index spoke in a volume so quiet that I had to strain to hear: "Runes. The language with twenty-four characters, indicative of mystery and intrigue. Used by Germanic tribes. Roots for Old English."

It wasn't so much what she said that disturbed me. Normally, if someone had a bloody gash on her stomach, I expected them to panic and scream. Instead, her tone was icy, calm, mechanical and so devoid of emotion that discounted the credibility of her humanity.

"Innocentius cannot be destroyed normally. Only by erasing the runes that powered it can it be dispelled." She said in that voice. Though the delivery method was unnerving, the information was something upon which I could act, especially when a quiet tut from Mr. Barcode and the glimpse of a twisted grimace on his face confirmed the value of that statement.

He was distracted. My brain screamed for action, so I quickly drew my pistol and fired at him. I didn't empty my magazine; I only had the 10 rounds in the magazine and 1 round in the chamber, after all, and I didn't want to just use them all up like that. The first round caught him completely by surprise and hit his hand. The second round went wide and melted into Innocentius.

"Why you...!" He yelped in pain as he bled through a hole in his hand, before letting out a loud, threatening growl.

"Touma, keep them busy!" Distracted enough by the pain, he couldn't act quickly as I carried Index and dashed for the wall of flames. It was simple, really. The wall of blazes was only meant to intimidate and not actually meant to stop. Not many people are willing to walk into a wall of fire. But fire needed time to burn; there wouldn't be much transfer of thermal energy if I dash through it fast enough.

Of course, that was assuming that the wall was thin enough for me to dash through, which was indeed the case as I burst through the wall of flames without significant injuries. It was uncomfortable as heck, though; my clothes felt like that they were in the dryer a second ago.

"Stop right there, punk! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust!" I moved as my ability instructed and stepped to the right. A wave of flames flooded the hallway as I turned the corner and narrowly avoided the gush of fire. If I were a split second slower, I would have ended up as a charcoal briquette instead of sitting here.

I mentally counted my remaining ammunition as I quickly descended the stairs. Mr. Barcode wouldn't be caught by surprise again; the next time I end up facing him, I'd be dead.

The sound of battle didn't weaken at all; Innocentius' screeches and Touma's grunts were clearly audible. I wondered how much attention we attracted. The police would get here and, upon finding spent cartridges, would ask uncomfortable questions that I would rather avoid. Well, scratch that; they'd probably frisk me first, and then find the piece I carry, and then I'd be placed somewhere I'd rather not be in, before asking me questions I'd rather not answer.

It was then that I noticed the pieces of paper with strange glyphs written on them slapped all over the walls. They were simple, photographic paper: durable enough to maintain and flexible enough to roll into a roll if needed. The paper was slapped on the wall with a strip of two-sided adhesive on the back, but trying to tear them off was folly as even touching them would almost burn my hand like touching a hot pan. I tore one off anyway to examine it; amazingly, the paper lost its temperature as soon as I detached it from the wall. The thick, black glyphs were apparently written with a marker, and it reminded me of the runes in fantasy novels.

Runes...

Those were the runes Index talked about earlier. If I could destroy them, Innocentius wouldn't be a problem for Touma. But how? I couldn't even tear them off because of the heat, and it was quite difficult to tear photographic paper. Besides, there were way too many for me to tear off, and time was something that I sorely lacked-that Index sorely lacked. Subconsciously I tried to rub the rune. If I couldn't destroy the paper, there was no reason that I couldn't destroy the rune. And sure enough, it turned into a black smidge; I still had some sweat on my fingers, and it apparently dissolved the ink.

The dumb bastard wrote his runes with a water-soluble marker!

I was ecstatic. The issue then, would be to get enough water to wash everything off. It wasn't a problem: every dorm building was equipped with a sprinkler system, and if I could get enough smoke to the detectors I could trigger it. Speaking of which, why wasn't it triggered in the first place? There was this living monstrosity covered in flames downstairs, and Mr. Barcode had flooded the corridor with fire more than once.

If actual fire didn't work, maybe pulling the fire alarm would trigger the sprinklers.

"Sorry. Hang in there, Index." I gently set her down on the ground. Her breathing was quick and shallow; if I didn't get her somewhere where she could get medical attention and quickly, she'd slip into a coma due to blood loss and die. But I couldn't just leave Touma as he was there; he couldn't beat Innocentius alone.

I dashed to the fire alarm and smashed the fragile glass cover with my hand. Every second counted. Bits of glass stuck in my hand because I was smashing it too hard, but I didn't mind; with a firm pull, I activated the fire alarm. The bells rang and the sprinklers, as expected, turned on. The ink from the paper washed away and the runes dissolved in the shower of water.

That should take care of Innocentius. Now, about Index...

At that point, taking her to an ambulance wasn't an option. She had already lost too much blood, and if she wasn't immediately infused with the right type of blood, she wouldn't survive. Neither Touma nor I knew her blood type, and I doubted that hospitals in Academy City would welcome her with open arms; as far as I know, she didn't have any form of identification on her, and Academy City was pretty paranoid about unidentified outsiders.

"I got rid of them. Didn't think turning on the sprinklers would help." Touma dashed downstairs as I thought with Index in my arms. "Is she still alive?"

"Yeah, barely." I answered. Her breathing had become even shallower; it was a sign that blood loss was nearing critical levels. But I hadn't a clue how to save her life without involving the hospital. "We can't get her to the hospital."

"What do you mean? An ambulance is her best chance now!" Touma argued as he tried to wrest her frail body from my arms. "We gotta go!"

"What would they do if they found out that she had no ID and she's here illegally!?" I retorted. There was no time for petty arguments and vain struggles; her life hung by a thread and Touma was disagreeing with me on how to treat her.

Of course, he stopped. My point was powerful enough: "What do we do, then...?"

"Stop... the bleeding..." Index whispered. The light returned to her eyes; that emotionless machine-like voice was no more, replaced by the more-familiar, soft voice that she had. "If you... stem the bleeding... someone could... use a spell... to fix it..."

Both of us rushed back upstairs past the body of Mr. Barcode, who was sprawled on the ground with a broken nose and a bleeding face. He did a number to the building; metal stuff were melted, and even the door to Touma's dorm room was warped slightly. We found bandages and quickly bandaged her wound up, but it would only slow the bleeding. She needed professional help.

"So, what do we do now? You'll cast a spell? Like 'abracadabra' and you'll just heal?" Touma whispered.

I had a different idea. Since I pulled the fire alarm, emergency services would be here pretty soon; besides, it wasn't like Innocentius was invisible at night. Staying here wouldn't be safe; not with a body in front of our dorms: "We gotta move. I don't want to be caught with a gun and a bleeding girl."

How did they find Index so quickly? More importantly, why did she come back?

Did someone see her leave the dorm room when she left, and baited her back? No, that wasn't a possibility. If they saw her leave, they would've attacked there and then. Because Mr. Barcode had no idea about either my or Touma's ability, we wouldn't have been taken into account in their planning. Then, the only possibility was that they found Touma's dorm room, somehow, and waited for Index to come back, knowing for certain that she would return at some point.

But why did she come back...?

I glanced around. Lying on Touma's bed was the nun's hood, the one that Index accidentally left behind.

But it shouldn't have been... wait. Touma's right hand only touched Index's shoulder. It never touched the hood. Index said that the magicians could track her by the power signature from her robe; there was no reason to believe that they couldn't track her by the hood, either.

That was why she came back, and that was how they found her.

Damn it! If I had paid more attention, I'd have brought it with me! Why didn't I think of that before!?

"Touma, grab that hood with your right hand." I pointed to the hood and explained. "You didn't touch it, so they tracked it to here and waited for her to come back, which she did."

"Damn it!" He grabbed the hood and gently placed it on Index's head. "What else do we need to do?"

"Find… someone…" Index drifted in and out of consciousness. Strange, that she said that. Either Touma or I could cast the spell for her; finding a body shouldn't be a problem.

But it turned out, it was: "Espers… like you and… him… can't use magic…"

Damn it. I should've foreseen that. I thought it would be good enough to get her to somewhere where the cops couldn't find and others couldn't see and then carry out whatever arcane rituals or daemonic pacts she had to make, but now we had to find someone suitable to cast that spell for her.

Espers like Touma and I couldn't use magic. Did that mean…?

"… so, people who aren't espers should be able to do that for you, right?" I asked in confirmation. Her pupils dilated a little and she forced a smile onto her face when she nodded in confirmation.

Then, it was clear what we should do. Amongst the people we knew, Komoe was never an esper; she would be able to help us with her healing. She was a teacher, as well. It would make her all the easier to manipulate; her protectiveness of her students would prove useful to have her work toward our end.

"Let's go." I gestured Touma, who picked Index up as gingerly and carefully as he could. "Let's head to Komoe's. She can help Index cast the spell."

He followed without complaint, though I'd imagine that he'd have a lot of questions for me. I'd have to explain to him how I got the gun later, for one.

It wouldn't be a pleasant conversation.

* * *

Touma was much stronger than I was. It was probably because that he couldn't get out of trouble the way that I could by maneuvering in a way that would get me out of sight. Instead, he had to fight his way out of thugs, gangs, and people who he looked at the wrong way.

So, he was the one carrying Index on his back while I directed our party through alleys and hidden pathways. As I expected, emergency services—fire trucks, ambulances, even some police cars—were congregating on the dorm building. I was certain that both Touma and I would face some questions later from the police, but that would be a small bump in the road compared to the verbal and possible physical lashing we'd get from the dorm manager. The majority of damage happened outside our dorm rooms, after all.

"Turn left!" I skidded and saw Touma following full-steam behind me. The route I picked wasn't the most straightforward route, but it would minimize our exposure to the public and get us relatively quickly to her place while keeping Index alive to the best of our abilities.

"Right!" My heart raced as I kept up the pace. I wasn't the most physically conditioned amongst the people I knew, but I could keep up with jogging for a couple hours, or a fifteen-minute mad dash to a teacher's place. Luckily, her apartment was not far from where we were, and the stairs were not hard to climb.

"Teach! Teach!" I smashed the doorbell button and pounded on the door as Touma caught his breath behind me with Index on his back. Index was bleeding away on his back, and every second was precious; the outcomes in the decision tree were getting worse and worse with every passing moment.

"Eh, I don't need any newspaper!" There was this singsong voice coming from the inside. Damn it, Komoe, get your shit together already! I thought.

"Teach! It's us! Shimura and Kamijou! We need your help!"

"Oh, yeah, okay, I'm coming…" I pounded on the door and tugged on the door knob. Unsurprisingly, neither component actually complied with me. The door never budged a millimeter even as I charged into it with my shoulder.

"The door's a little stiff, so—AHH!" She opened the damned door just as I made my most recent charge! I shoulder tackled the midget to the ground as a result, and conveniently my entire body lay on top of hers in a quite embarrassing manner which, for the purpose of saving me some face, I shall not describe. Anyway, I quickly scrambled up and out of the way for our Lolita teacher, who was unsurprisingly wearing a bunny parka as her sleeping clothes at the time.

"Ouchies… ouchies ouchie ouchie…" She rubbed her bum much like an elementary school student would while giving out cute expressions of pain. To be honest, I couldn't care less about how cute she was or how likely she was going to induce Touma into a blind mating frenzy at that moment. She needed to cooperate with us and cast that spell for Index and that was all. The less she knew about all this magic and grimoire business, the better.

"Miss Komoe, there's no time to explain!" Touma still bothered to refer to the Lolita with honorifics. At this moment, a single syllable used on frivolous courtesy was too many. "We need your help saving this girl!"

"Huh? What? Saving…!" As we were talking, both of us squeezed into her room.

I have to make a special note here for Miss Komoe's room. As a professor slash researcher, she didn't have the money to rent a nice, large room for her to stay in. Instead, she had to rent a small apartment for singles and the financially under-privileged in the poorer part of District 7. And, instead of a nice and tidy room like what is expected from a lady, her room was anything but lady-like. Beer cans and—can you believe it?—cigarette butts littered the floor, and garbage piled up everywhere. I had to give her credit, though; the garbage was at least mostly in black plastic bags ready for trash collection. Still, the room reeked; I had to shield my nose as I enter, and Touma had to wait for the Lolita to actually create a clearing to set down his charge. That kind of environment couldn't be good for the wound, I thought.

"Keep her company!" Touma pleaded as I went for fresh air outside. His pleading the teacher would be enough; she liked him better than she liked me, anyway; I'd just be an eyesore in there. "Please, do anything she says and keep her company! Doesn't matter what circumstance, please don't let her slip into a coma!"

"But… but… this… I have to…" Komoe stammered.

Damn it, just do as he said already! I clenched my fists: "Touma, we need to get an ambulance."

"But I want to see if I can do anything to—"

"You cannot be here. Your presence will nullify the ritual." Index reminded him with that mechanical voice of hers. That voice gave me the creeps. Speaking of which, Touma's face had just twisted into a jumbled mess like a plate of boiled spaghetti.

"Is there really nothing that—"

"Your presence will nullify the ritual. Please remove your presence from the ritual field at once, or we cannot start constructing the necessary objects and items for the healing spell."

Touma grunted and smashed his fist on the ground. I've seen enough of this drama; every second wasted diminished Index's chances of survival. I shielded my nose and dragged Touma out of that foul room by his collars despite his protests before shutting the slightly deformed iron door in front of him.

"Hey, what the fuck was that for?" He slammed me against the outer wall right after he got up from the ground.

"You deaf or something? She wants you out of there. Every second we waste is a second spent not healing her. Every second not healing her is one second close to her death. You know what I'm saying?" I wouldn't bother giving him a lecture, but a little education was required.

"Damn it, I just wished I could do more to help." He let go of me after a second of silence. He wasn't as unreasonable as he appeared to be; he just followed his heart a lot more than his head. "Speaking of which, I'm gonna go call an ambulance."

"It's not gonna help." An ambulance was just going to attract more attention at this point; if Index's spell couldn't heal her, then she'd better pray that Dear Heavenly Father of hers to give her a miracle, because her wounds would get a lot more complicated after being in that cesspit of a room for five minutes.

"Right." He sighed and leaned against the handrails facing me. "How'd you get that gun? I never figured you'd be the type to mix with the gangsters."

"Well, I do whatever I need to protect myself. I'm nowhere close to the physical strength and agility you have, and I don't have no ability like yours to turn off abilities, so I gotta get some firepower of my own." To speak the truth, or not to speak the truth, that was indeed the question. I planned a full disclosure with him if he did ask for it, but now that he filled the blanks himself, it saved me the trouble.

"That's true, but I ain't buyin' it." He crossed his arms. Drat. I might need that speech, after all. "How'd you get that gun? It's not that easy to get a gun. A pistol's even tougher; Anti-Skill and Judgment are all cracking down on illegal weapons. So, why don't you be honest with me? What exactly are you hiding from me, Ryouko-chan?"

Well. "The gun's a long story, and it involved me meeting Little Miss Sparkles, but… Can you promise me not to tell others?"

"I always wondered how you met her. You two have a good relationship going, huh. I can sense the vibe." He chuckled. Damn it, he is _not_ shipping the two of us together; I thought at that time.

"Well, that's a new one, you sensing vibes." I retorted, coaxing an indignant growl from him, to which I responded with a snide chuckle. "Anyway. Promise?"

"Yeah. I'm not one to gossip around. You know that."

"Okay. This is going to be… a very, very long conversation."

"We got time. Till Index's ritual is complete, that is."

So, I told him about the full extent of my ability. Why was I keeping it a secret, you say? Well, if I didn't, they'd have drafted me into some program to study me and use me as a living sample. Vivisection wasn't outlawed in Academy City, you know; and there was this urban legend about a lab where researchers would keep their subjects alive while conducting all kind of experiments on them, most of them involving said vivisection. Then they'd sew the victims up and keep them in cells for further study. I wouldn't want that fate on my worst enemy, much less myself.

"So, lemme get this straight. You're a precog, and you can read seven of your decisions into the future." Touma slowly scratched his head while letting out a growl and kicking his foot. "So, you can basically buy a lottery ticket a week without getting caught cheating, and you basically predicted that Index is going to be okay if we get her here fast enough. How are you not ruling the world yet?"

"I haven't thought about that; thanks for mentioning it. Maybe I'll one day run for, oh, I don't know, president of the United States and then nuke this shithole to oblivion?" I joked. He growled menacingly at me for a second, as if the thought of nuking Academy City was somehow offensive to him. "So, anyway, that's the gist of my ability. Any more questions?"

"You can read all outcomes clearly and concisely. Even the ones involving my actions?"

"No." I explained. "The outcomes where your actions are a factor relevant to deciding the answer to the question I ask will always be fuzzy. My ability has a probability number associated with each outcome; usually that number is 1, or 100%. When said outcome involves you, however, that number will be less than 1, meaning that the outcome—even after I take these actions—would still not be 100% guaranteed. You're the unstable factor. You're the one that I can't predict."

"Well, that's reassuring." He sighed. "That way, I wouldn't need to worry about my plan of stealing all your money be exposed."

"Nay, good Mister Kamijou," I teased him, "Your natural misfortune would take care of that for me."

"Drat." He cursed. "But, that's a convenient ability for you to have. Can I have one of your lottery tickets? My account is literally broken this month."

"Yeah, yeah, your squashed cash card." I sighed. "Come to me next week; that's when the new Lotto numbers are out. I can't give you the grand prize, what with there being too much media attention and stuff, but what I can give you is a number of smaller winnings, say 50 thousand yen tickets. Each ticket only costs you about 500 yen, so it'd still be a 9900% profit margin. A couple of those, plus your monthly allowance from the city, should get you through the month without a problem."

"And in exchange, I keep my mouth shut about your abilities." He smiled. The guy wasn't stupid, but to think that he could outwit me…

"You'd keep me posted about Index, and you'd be my hit man. Whenever I wanna use ya to kick some ass, I'll just wave a couple lottery tickets in your way and you'll help. Deal?" For him to think that he could outwit me was preposterous. It was a mutually beneficial deal; he had a more stable source of income, while I get a hit man who could take care of potentially anyone that would dare come in my way. It was a win-win. Well, he'd go on and get me into many, many more dangerous situations than I'd ask him to do a job, but those are stories for other times.

"Hmm…" He tapped his foot and stroked his beardless chin. Really, boys would've been growing beards at his age; I thought all his hair-generating powers went into the follicles on his scalp, resulting in such unceremonious spiky hair.

"Mister Kamijou?"

"Well, after careful consideration of your offer, Ryouko-chan, I accept this treaty between our two nations." He smiled. What did he think he was, a diplomat? Any country that uses him as a diplomat would have wars declared against them on every front within a month, what with his offensive personality and even more offensive hairdo.

"Okay, that's one lottery ticket off the total." And he called me Ryouko-chan. I hate people calling me Ryouko-chan.

"What did I do wrong!?"

"Two now, for having no idea what I was talking about even though I talked to you about that constantly!" How many times did I have to beat the idea of "not to call me Ryouko-chan" into his head? Apparently, I'm still searching for that answer, because he _still_ calls me by that name!

I was planning to give him half a dozen 50 thousand yen tickets, but that number had reduced to 4 at the moment and, depending on how he addressed me, it was going to become smaller and smaller.

"Oh, goodness, what misfortune! But tell me; is Index going to be fine?" He lamented in that usual tone of his before returning to a serious expression. I could tell that he was worried. The uncertainty was killing him, because he didn't know the future.

"She's going to be fine," I reassured him. "She'll require a couple of days to recover, but she is going to be fine."

He breathed a long sigh of relief. Really, the big softie was getting on my nerves.


	2. Chapter 2

**II: You Can't Level Up Without Killing Slimes**

Index was healed without incident. With the hood's tracking capabilities destroyed, Mr. Barcode couldn't find us as easily as he did the last time even if he recovered from the broken nose Touma gave him. It served him right, I reckoned; a guy who hunted down little girls deserved to have his nose broken into itty bitty little pieces.

I left Touma and Index at Komoe's. He had a better relationship with her, anyway; she seemed to fawn over him even though every time she talked to him it sounded like a scolding. As Komoe began to chide the spiky-haired boy who was almost twice as tall as her, I found the scene comical to say the least.

As for me, I had some other business to which I must attend. More specifically, since I was involved with this whole magic business, I might need some more firepower, and the source of that was sitting under my bed in a fortified arms locker.

Academy City had strict gun control laws like the rest of the country, but firearms were not hard to come by if one knew where to look. The City's armed forces, Anti-Skill, were mostly formed with mercenaries and soldiers masquerading as teachers. They had in their collection some impressive pieces of artillery that could be bought with the right price. Besides, being mercenaries, they wouldn't mind a little extra income. And so, greasing one to get me the right attachments and ammunition through their own sources was simply a matter of applying my impressive negotiation skills along with a sizable cash incentive.

Emergency services had already left the area. There wasn't much to investigate; the incident would most likely be classified as one where a pyrokineticist's power somehow went berserk. Repair work would likely take some time to conduct. Thanks to both human laziness and red tape, no repair crew was present yet, so I could access my room through the front door without people knowing I was there.

The cabinet under my bed could only be accessed by actually moving my bed out of the way. This was mainly to prevent thieves from stealing from my armory when I was asleep, but it could also warn me that someone had taken stuff without my permission if the position of my bed had shifted.

I had a total of three pieces in there. My other handgun was a Glock 19 with a threaded barrel for attaching a suppressor; of course, the suppressor that I purchased for it cost me a fortune, as did the rest of the accessories, but I considered them money well spent. The gun was a little bulky, but the 9mm Parabellum bullets it fired offered much more power than the SR-22's anemic .22 Long Rifle cartridge. For more serious situations, I had a MP5K-PDW variant, a fairly compact submachine gun that fires the same 9mm rounds as the Glock 19 at an impressive 15 rounds per second full-auto. It had its own hard metal case wrapped in black leather to disguise it like a gentleman's suitcase in order to avoid attracting attention, and I had bought an EO Tech holographic sight as well as a rail-mounted flashlight and a forward grip for it.

My largest piece, though, was a specialized rifle for more covert matters. It was a Desert Tactical Arms SRS, chambered specifically for the .338 Lapua Magnum round that would remain effective up to a mile away. The rifle had a hard metal guitar case wrapped in black leather to avoid attracting attention; it was a guitar case because the rifle was too damn long for a standard briefcase. I bought a number of accessories from my arms-dealing Anti-Skill guy for this rifle, including an illuminated variable zoom 16x scope, an infrared-laser pointer, a bipod, and a small ballistics spotting scope that could automatically calculate the correct trajectory when the target was properly set.

I admit, I am a bit of a gun nut. At the time, I decided that it wasn't yet time to bust out the artillery, so I swapped my Ruger for the Glock, and checked my watch. It wasn't even 10 o'clock in the morning yet, and I was without much to do.

Touma and I had become involved in something way over our heads through what seemed to be sheer bad luck. There was a magical cabal then after Index inside the city. Academy City didn't like strangers; therefore, we couldn't exactly report Index's existence to the authorities. Touma would certainly not allow Index to come to harm, being the big softie he was, and I was certainly not going to alienate such a wonderful pawn for an investigation that probably wouldn't go anywhere.

As for the magical cabal, I had no idea who they were and the only representative of said cabal that I had met was Mr. Barcode whose name I didn't even know properly. When Index would recover, I'd ask her about everything, but at that time she was quite seriously injured and did require some rest.

My phone serendipitously rang when I was just about to nod off in boredom. Mikoto's scream over the phone was loud enough that I didn't need speaker phone to hear her from a foot away: "What the hell have you been doing!? I've been calling you and calling you!"

"Sparky, calm down," I noticed a "5" beside the "missed calls" icon. Damn it; she had indeed been calling me, but my phone was on vibrate and I didn't feel it while I was busy putting everything back to their rightful place. "What's going on?"

"There's been some movement on the Level Upper situation," she took an audible deep breath before lowering her voice, "we have another person slipping into a coma."

Interesting. So, the guy at the mall wasn't alone in falling into a coma. There seemed to be a pattern emerging, and the pattern was supporting my hypothesis awfully well: "You got a sample of Level Upper yet?"

"I was hoping you would get it," she snapped. It wasn't a baseless hope; I was officially recorded as Precog Level 0, and so far everyone who had been rendered unconscious were people with fairly low level of power. Misaka, being a Level 5, had no use for Level Upper, after all.

"I've been a little preoccupied recently." I answered as I locked my dorm room door. "Sorry I couldn't look into it much after the meeting yesterday…

"Wait, hold on a sec." Standing in front of me was a busty woman with a sword longer than her height on her hip. She was as tall as Touma was, and she was strangely dressed: she was wearing a white T-shirt with a knot deliberately tied at her waist to reveal her well-muscled midriff, a pair of jeans with one leg sawn off, and she was wearing a pair of cowboy boots. Her skin was snowy white, like a princess, and her black Rapunzel hair was tied into a high ponytail with some white ribbons.

"What's going on?" Mikoto asked as I met the gaze from the strange woman.

"Sorry, Sparky, but I'm going to have to cut this short. I'll call you back." I hang up on her and placed my hand on the grip of my Glock 19.

She could be a member of the magical cabal. Her attire and that large katana on her hip were all signs that she was never going to blend in with the populace here.

"You're with Mr. Barcode, aren't you?" I asked. Given her stature, her build, her weapon and the distance between us, even if I could draw my pistol, fire at her in the blink of an eye and manage to kill her with one hit, I would be cut. There was no escape other than jumping off of the 8th floor, which would also result in certain death. The best course of action was to convince her that killing me wouldn't give her what she wanted, which I assumed was the location of Index.

"You are a sharp one," she gave a smile so small that I almost didn't notice. "Then you know what I'm here for."

"Well, I don't even know who you are, lady," I returned a smile without taking my hand off of my pistol, "so, why don't we introduce each other first? My name is Shimura Ryou and I'm just another student in Academy City."

"Kanzaki Kaori," She said. She was straining to be detached, because the iciness in her tone was much too forced. "I am a member of the Church of England, of the division named _Necessarius_."

"_Necessarius_." I chewed on the name a little. In Latin, the name meant "necessary; required; needed".

As in, the name meant necessary evil.

This is getting interesting, I thought.

"Why are you chasing after her?" I asked while stroking my chin. Demanding answers from an athletic woman armed with a long katana wasn't the brightest of ideas, but in a first contact situation, it was helpful to push the boundaries a little.

"I'm the one asking questions. Where is she?" She was a little impatient. It was understandable, of course, given what seemed to go on inside her and the cracks in the calmness of her tone.

"Let's make this clear. If you kill me, you have to find her all by yourself, plus you'll have to clean up the blood stains on the wall which, quite frankly, are hard to scrub off." I smiled as her stance crouched slightly. She was getting ready to slice me apart with her blade. "I'm assuming that you're here under cover and you don't really want Academy City to be on your case, and I sure as hell am not willing to die for a little girl, so why don't we settle this amicably?"

"I'm not going to answer your questions until you answer mine."

"Well, that's an awfully quick rejection, Miss Kanzaki. Hear me out, at least." I gestured. There was something bitter in my mouth. My heart was beating awfully fast. The tension of the situation thickened in front of me; the air seemed to condense into molasses accordingly, making my breathing a bit harder than normal.

"I don't share your patience." She replied. "I can't kill you, but I can make this as painful as possible."

"You wouldn't want to do that," She was bluffing; I thought. My smile grew stiffer as time trickled by. "Pain is only going to make me make stuff up and lead you to the wrong places. Because you don't have any way to vet my information, you'll have to take my word for it. You wouldn't want to be sent on a wild goose chase, now, would you?"

"Cheeky one, aren't you." I could see the katana's gleaming edge. She was about to draw and cut me in one stroke; if she decided to do that, I would be powerless to stop her. But if she did want to negotiate, I was the one holding all the chips on the table. "Very well, then. What do you have to say for yourself, Shimura Ryou?"

"Just a few observations of mine," I began. I wouldn't let her know where Index was even if she had to kill me. "Neither you nor Mr. Barcode seemed like bad people, even though Mr. Barcode had too many piercings for my liking and you were threatening to dice me into bite-sized pieces."

Her smile—one ever so slight that would easily be missed—didn't fade, but it twitched a little. I was right on the money with that one: "You are after her for a reason that you think would justify the actions you take. I can't put my finger on it, though; what could you possibly think that would justify burning someone to death or cubing someone into stew meat?

"That got me thinking," the small smile turned into a grimace as her frown was a bit more apparent on her face. I didn't stop observing her facial expression: reading her reactions to my words could tell me just how close I hit to home. "If you have to justify taking an innocent life that just happened to stand in your way, then logically the prize must be equal or greater than that life. Perhaps you were trying to save Index's life, then? Perhaps there was something to her that we didn't know?"

"What makes you think that?" Her eyes widened before her face became steely once more. "We simply want the grimoires in her head, or perhaps I just like killing people."

I may have hit the nail on the head that time; I thought as my grin grew wider: "That isn't your objective, no. If you really wanted her grimoires, you would want her alive; you wouldn't have cut her like that before abandoning her in front of our dorm rooms. Besides, if you really liked killing people, I'd be dead already."

"I didn't expect that to happen. Her Walking Church should have protected her from that strike."

Some honesty from her, at last! There was a hint of guilt in her eyes, too, which solidified my thoughts all the more. She was on the defensive. I could use that to my advantage and breach her fort: "But it didn't. Did you perhaps notice that the Walking Church is now held together with dozens of safety pins? You must have, but not before your strike landed. So, tell me, what did you hope to accomplish with what was supposed to be a harmless attack?"

"_Nanasen_!" Instead of answering that question, she announced a name but barely moved. Seven deep gashes appeared around me with a gale of razor winds that left countless small cuts on me, each one of them drawing a thimble of blood. The pain forced my hand off of my pistol and I stumbled backwards, barely managing to hold onto a section of handrail that didn't melt to balance myself.

"I have no time for these games," she returned the blade to its sheath as she announced, "Where is she?"

Damn. I must've said something that angered her. Perhaps my words reminded her of her motive behind chasing Index: "Like I said, you accomplish nothing and you gain nothing by killing me, so why don't you just tell me what I want to know and I'll tell you what you want to know?"

"What do you want to know? Make it quick; I haven't all morning."

"Why are you chasing after her? And don't give me the 'grimoire' bullshit; I'm not buying it." I struggled to stand firm. My shirt and pants were nothing but rags, then. Thankfully the member between my legs wasn't cut; I prayed sincerely that it would stay that way.

"We need to perform on her a ritual that will sustain her life. If we do not, she will die."

Index was a magical time bomb; It made sense as a restraining device, sort of like explosive collars worn by slaves in fictional settings. But at the same time, it didn't make sense at all. Mr. Barcode and Kanzaki here appeared to be her caretakers, and they didn't seem to be bad people. Why would Index run away from them knowing that there was an explosive collar tied around her neck? Furthermore, I could only assume that she had a conversation with Mr. Barcode after his crushing defeat last night. Why didn't she ask Touma to erase the spell with his right hand knowing that his right hand could erase any kind of magic or supernatural phenomenon?

The only conclusion I could come to at the moment was that Index didn't even know she was wearing an explosive collar. The only way that she wouldn't know was that she wouldn't remember it being put on her in the first place, and Mr. Barcode and Kanzaki here didn't bother telling her that fact. But given that Index has eidetic memory, she would remember her experiences forever, so she must remember that spell being cast on her.

"The ritual would erase her memory but preserve the grimoires, wouldn't it?" That was the only logical conclusion; judging from Kanzaki's reactions, I was right.

There were then two possibilities. One, the ritual was truly necessary for Index to live. By conducting the ritual, it resets the timer on her ticking bomb, and allows her to live to the next time the ritual was needed. Two, the ritual wasn't necessary at all, and the Church of England was lying to these two dumb bastards to keep Index and them in line.

I couldn't determine which one was true. I had no evidence for either claim, and given the nature of megalomaniacal organizations, both seemed likely. Leaving Index alive in the hands of their enemy would be too dangerous, so the ticking bomb had to actually blow up to ensure that Index wasn't used against Necessarius and the Protestant Church. But given the value of Index herself as an asset, the Protestant Church would be foolish to kill her because someone missed a date on their calendar.

I turned my back on her, which coaxed another burst of wind that drove me to my knees: "I've fulfilled my end of the bargain. Tell me where she is, or you're not walking out of this alive."

"Miss Kanzaki," my arms quivered as I rolled onto my bum and sat on the ruined walkway, "Killing me would certainly be a logical choice for you because your information security has been compromised. If I could figure out what you guys did to Index, there's no telling who wouldn't figure it out. So, before I die, could you please answer one last question of mine?"

She stood in front of me, her sword in its sheath: "One last question."

I breathed heavily. I already knew why she was doing the things she did. I also thought that I knew the mechanism of action behind Index's explosive collar and the ritual. I needed to ask this question carefully to get the maximum amount of information out of her. And if she did decide to kill me; Well, she wouldn't. There was nothing I could do at that moment other than threatening her with Index's safety that would result in my death.

"If, hypothetically, there existed an ability that would erase whatever magic that's placed on something," I proposed the question, throwing out Touma's ability as a hypothesis, "would it save Index from dying?"

She hesitated for quite some time before answering: "No."

That was a good enough answer. I chuckled; in a few moments, that chuckle turned into a hearty laugh.

"What's so funny?" She asked. She hadn't a clue why I laughed.

"You've been played!" I squeezed the words out of my mouth between fits of laughter. "You've been played like the dumb bastards you are and you don't even know it!"

She drew her sword and pointed it at my head: "Explain yourself before I split your head open like a melon."

She took my insults pretty well. I was impressed: "Well, if the enchantment on Index isn't going to kill her, then it must be one of her physical characteristics that's going to kill her. And, being an ordinary girl, Index is no different from the rest of us, except that she has eidetic memory. Assuming that you're not lying, and then a simple bit of deduction would reveal that it's the eidetic memory that's going to kill her."

"The brain can't hold that many grimoires and remember everything she experiences." She muttered.

"Don't underestimate the human brain, _bitch_," I crawled back up, and her sword followed my movements. "Instead of lamenting how you can't help but erase her memories, why don't you read up on neuroscience and neurology instead?"

"I don't have time for this." She stared straight into my eyes, "If you're wrong, then she's going to die if I don't conduct the ritual in six days. Besides, how can I trust you?"

"The core of science is independent verification. That's what makes science more respectable than your fairy tales: you don't have to trust me," I returned her stare. Backing down would signal a lack of conviction, and her conviction was weaker the more I attacked it with my words, "If you can't believe me, at least believe in the hundreds and thousands of scientists working independently across the globe. Go check. If the facts support your decision, then I'll freely give Index away to you to do as you please…"

Before I even finished the sentence, she was gone, leaving me to contend with the gashes on the floor and shredded clothes.

Well, hopefully our little chat left a mark in her psyche. I sighed and found the access card to my room. I needed to change out of the rags I wore into something more respectable before I meet Misaka later in the day.

* * *

"You're saying a woman attacked you out of nowhere?" Misaka was incredulous; she had every right to be. "Just like that? With a katana, too, of all things?"

"I'd prefer if you keep this between us?" I bit into the hot dog she bought for me. She wouldn't touch any of my food because I usually slather whatever hot spices there were at hand onto my servings. This time, it was a full tube of Sriracha hot sauce.

"How the hell did you get involved with a woman like that, anyway? What is she, your ex-girlfriend or something? Did you do something to piss her off?" Misaka was blushing a little when she said that. It was probably because of the tiny bit of mustard on her hot dog.

"If my ex-girlfriend were that hot, she would instead be my _current_ girlfriend." I countered with a sly smile, putting due emphasis on "current". The heat from the hot sauce soaked my shirt with sweat. "You know, her knockers were at least D cup."

"So you've had an ex-girlfriend?" Why was she averting her eyes, I wonder? "Tell me, what's she like?"

"Nah, I was just messing with you on that one. I'm only 16, and it's not like I'm actually a playboy. I'm a nerd, for goodness sake! And awkward around women, no less," I shoved the last bit of food into my mouth. "Besides, I wouldn't want any woman manlier than I am to be my girlfriend. That just wouldn't be right in terms of gender balance."

"Somehow I'm not surprised that you think like a middle-aged divorced man," a spark flew form Misaka's forehead as she, too, consumed her last morsel.

"I have an inferiority complex about my lack of manliness and my 'unfortunate' heterosexual orientation," I lay back on the iron chair and tossed her my smartphone, "here, help me charge this."

"I'm not your universal charger," she pouted.

"Well, I need it to help you with your investigation, so if you don't mind?" The battery meter was blinking red. These things really didn't last as long as the good old plastic bricks.

Misaka quietly put her fingers on the charging port of the phone and sighed: "On a more serious note… what do you think is happening with Level Upper?"

"Well, there isn't a whole lot of new information on that front. Not as much as I'd prefer, anyway," I stroked my smooth, beardless chin. Even Spiky had some stubbles growing out of his, damn it. "A second coma case doesn't tell me a whole lot, but it does suggest that the use of Level Upper and people going comatose for apparently no reason are possibly related. As for my earlier hypothesis, we don't really have any evidence that the brains of these people are actually networked to perform computations. If we can prove that, then we might really be onto something here."

"How do you suppose we do that?"

"I have no idea," I kicked back and rested my head on my hands. "Where are the comatose victims located?"

"Why?"

"I want to talk to the doctor in charge. Maybe there're some clues in the vital signs of these people." It was another lead we had to chase down as investigators. "By the way, what are your Judgment friends doing? Don't tell me they're just dallying about with ice cream in their hands."

"Well, they have their own business to attend to," she stood up. The iron chair under her bum let out a painful grinding groan when she pushed it back on the pavement. "You know their job description. They can't exactly spend all their time on this investigation like us freelancers."

"Funny you should mention that," I smiled as I rolled off of the chair. "Say, don't they have a slush fund or something? I'd like some of that when this is over; bullets aren't cheap in this city, you know."

Mikoto seemed incredulous: "what, you think we need to kill someone?"

The thought of the need for violence never crossed her mind, it appeared. If we uncovered the identity of the network's owner, he or she would retaliate with everything in their power to keep the secret buried. Dead people never talk, after all: "well, maybe it won't come to that, but we need to be careful. So, where're the patients?"

"I know where they are. Follow me." The hospital was surprisingly close to my dorm building. It was an imposing building from the outside. No doubt it also doubled as a research facility to carry out ESP research; it made sense, after all. The two victims of Level Upper were monitored in separate rooms. Members of Judgment guarded both rooms, but Mikoto was able to get us access because she had been here before with Kuroko.

I tapped my phone on the small plate on his bed and got the information on his patient profile before sitting down beside the bed. Kaitabi Hatsuya, male, age 14. His ability was called Synchrotron, which enabled him to cause explosions with aluminum objects. Apparently, he was the cause of a string of bombings that injured quite a few people, including nine members of Judgment. The bombings were in the news. I didn't think that all users of Level Upper had criminal tendencies, but the City was pretty strictly stratified amongst the students according to their levels. Teenagers being who they were, their hormone-overdosed heads would lead them to bully the weak; Level Upper gave the weak a reason to rise up and fight back with equally hormone-overdosed heads.

"What are you thinking?" I snapped out of my train of thought. Mikoto's face was right beside mine, reading the information scrolling on my phone with intense interest.

She probably wouldn't want to hear the disparaging remarks I had regarding teenagers: "I was just thinking that the bombings were on the news earlier."

"Yeah. His last bombing was the one in Seventh Mist. My friends and I were there shopping. The incident was recorded a couple of days ago. You remember." She commented nonchalantly.

"Thanks to Spiky, you got saved," I muttered. I did remember; she dropped off the grid for the rest of the day and told me all about it the next day. I just didn't think that the perpetrator would be lying in the flesh in front of me. "And that was when Judgment started investigating the discrepancies in the Data Banks?"

Kaitabi's power level was only recorded as Level 2 in the Banks. There was no way that he could blow up entire buildings as a Level 2, but that was not new information.

"Yeah. Speaking of which, you haven't told me your neighbor's power yet." Damn it, I was hoping that she wouldn't notice. What was I thinking, really? Didn't the decision tree foretell such a conclusion?

"Just why are you so interested in him, anyway?" I countered her with a question of my own. "You know, we need to focus here. Level Upper is known to cause the user to go on a crime spree. If we don't resolve this soon, more people might get hurt."

"Okay," Mikoto muttered without objection. There had to be something going on in her mind. I wasn't a mind reader, though; her facial expressions at the moment were quite difficult to decipher. "How do you propose we resolve this situation, then?"

"I need to talk to the doctor in charge of the Level Upper patients," I stood up and pocketed my smartphone. "He knows more about the vitals of these students than I do, and he's going to be able to answer my questions."

"What are your questions, then, young man?"

Both of us turned around and saw the old man standing at the door of the room. "Ah! A living Gekota doll!" Misaka exclaimed for good reason. He looked exactly like a frog, except that he didn't have green skin. His eyes were wide apart, and his nose was wrinkled enough that it blended into his equally crumpled face. He was bald like men his age; what little hair he had were silvery gray.

"Sir," I stood up and bowed to the old man.

"Are you his friend?" His baritone grated against my ears. "There haven't been many visitors for him or the other girl."

"Um, no, we're with Judgment."

There was a small hint of disappointment in the doctor's sigh, and his tone became much more business-like: "Oh, well. As long as you're working to find out who did this to them, I'm not going to care."

"About that, I have a couple of questions for you, sir. How are their vitals?" I pulled out my cellphone again and started recording this conversation. It never hurt to have a copy of the recording on hand in case people asked questions about my credibility.

"What are you, a student journalist or something?" He arched an eyebrow. I did look like a journalist, I suppose: I had a recording device in my hand and I was dressed like a white-collar drone of all people. "It doesn't matter. Anyway; their vitals are fine. Breathing is steady, heart rate and blood pressures are okay; you know, the usual drill."

"Did you notice anything strange in particular? As in, is there anything unusual about their vital signs?"

"You know, when I said everything's normal, everything's normal. Well, as far as coma victims go, anyway." A little irritation was also normal for a man his age. It's not like someone pulled the entire "grumpy old schmuck" stereotype out of their ass.

Besides, I wasn't interested in their heart rate or what their LDL level was. They could all have a stroke and die for all I care; that'd make the investigation much, much more exciting, too: "What about the metrics related to their brains? Like, EEG and stuff. Did you notice anything strange in that area?"

"Well, now that you mentioned it, follow me."

The frog-faced old man led us to what I assumed to be his office. It was a messy office and a tiny one; but then again, didn't the stereotype of an academic genius predict messy offices? Misaka seemed to balk at the chaos of piles of paper and the many, many empty cans of soda, though.

"Ah, don't mind the mess," the old man instructed, directing our attention onto a monitor, "but here's what's interesting."

"These are the EEGs of the patients?" I could read the title of the window from behind him. I wasn't an expert by any means, but the EEG patterns for Kaitabi and the other girl were remarkably similar in every aspect. It was as if their brain activity was synchronized somehow.

"Yeah," he nodded, "you know what this means, don't you?"

"This is my guess, but their brain waves can't be similar by accident. There's something deeper going on," I was a little ecstatic. This may just be the thing I needed to prove my hypothesis.

"Normally, unconscious patients should show a consistent alpha wave pattern, which is what I've been observing in some of my patients so far," He opened a log file he had on the computer and displayed the two brain wave patterns stacked together. "But these two are different. Look here."

"The frequencies of the brain waves are much higher." Great; Mikoto seemed to be as absorbed in this as I was.

"These are beta and gamma patterns during this period," the old man highlighted the area of anomaly, "these patterns are associated with high cognitive activities and power usage shown through research. Why would…?"

"Bingo," I breathed.

"Hmm?" The old man gave me a quizzical look, "what are you thinking, young… lady?"

"I have a hypothesis that Level Upper may be used to network brains together to perform computation much like massive distributed computing networks… wait, what did you call me?" Mikoto couldn't suppress her laughter and it burst out in my face. I swear, if there were enough space around the cramped and clogged office, she would be rolling on the floor laughing in a fit of hysteria at me.

Damn that old man! Why did he have to pause before deciding that I was a girl?

He cleared his throat. The tension in the room was gone in the blink of an eye. "Anyway, your postulate is plausible, but who'd do such a thing?"

"You're a researcher. What would you do if there's something you absolutely must find out but you can't realistically get access to the computing power?" I connected my cell phone with his computer. His jaw slacked a little; I thought his face turned a bit paler, too, but in the dim lighting of the office I couldn't tell exactly. "Mind if I get these files from you? I might need them later."

"I wouldn't do something like this! This is dangerous to these kids! It might just kill them, you know!" He denied vehemently, "to accuse scholars like us to such heinous deeds! You have some nerve, young lady!"

"I wonder about that," I smiled as the file transfer finished, and got a still laughing Mikoto up on her feet, "We gotta go and find this guy. Thanks, doc. Take good care of these kids, all right?"

"Yeah, yeah; get outta here," he seemed more than happy to shove us out the door. Would it be because that I offended him by implying members of the academia would go to such lengths as to use unwitting victims to their own end? After all, if it were absolutely unavoidable, I would probably tread the same path as whoever this mastermind behind Level Upper was. But things would never come to that, I thought; I'd never have to prey on the innocent and the unrelated to achieve my goals.

Mikoto had finally stopped laughing after I dragged her sorry ass out of the hospital. She certainly did relish the chance to profit on my misery: "Maybe you should join some _kabuki_ club, you know! You'd be an awesome princess!"

"Shut the hell up, Sparkles," I snapped and tapped her head, "right now, instead of laughing at me like some kid, don't you need to call your Judgment friends and tell them our hypothesis?"

"… Yeah, you're right," she took a deep breath. I could see her hand trembling a little when she took out her cell phone: "But to think that someone would use them as mere computing nodes in a distributed network…"

"I'd have done the same thing if I had to."

"If you had to," she muttered in echo, before letting out a sharp "tut" and redialing the numbers. She did this a couple of times: "Damn that Kuroko! She's not answering!"

"What about her friends—?" The ground shook a little as a pillar of smoke and dust rose up in the distance. It was either an extraordinarily large explosion, or a building collapsed. And I betted that it had something to do with Judgment: "Maybe she's wreaking havoc over there."

"Hello, Uiharu-san? Yeah, do you know where Kuroko is? We may have a lead on the Level Upper... What? That… wait, we heard a huge explosion and we can see a plume of dust now… the address… I see. Okay, we'll be right there!" Mikoto hung up her phone with a crisp snap, "Yeah, that's exactly what she's doing. I think she just destroyed that building."

"Let's go. Maybe she needs a hand."

* * *

It turned out that Kuroko didn't need our help as much as she needed us to carry her out of there with her captive. She was pretty banged up by the time we got there and fainted as soon as she saw Mikoto on the scene. As we suspected, the guy she caught was also a user of Level Upper, and he was… well, less than cooperative with our interrogations.

We brought him back to the Judgment branch and asked the Anti-Skills to pick him up there. They arrived not long after we finished our questioning. It was too bad that Mikoto refused to manipulate his brain waves to get what we want out of him, or to zap him whenever he got too defiant; it would have been an effective measure against thugs like him.

"So, um… Mister Shimura, is it? It's nice to meet you." Kuroko's friend Uiharu was much better-adjusted than the mental picture of Kuroko that Mikoto drafted up for me. At least she was not immediately a raging lesbian psycho…

"You look prettier than I expected." Okay, I thought I'd retract that last statement. Mikoto was barely suppressing a giggle when she turned around and trembled. Okay, maybe Uiharu was just brutally honest; still, I remember how much my face twitched on that comment.

"Yeah, nice to meet you too, Flower Girl," I certainly said that with the least amount of sarcasm possible. "So, now that Kuroko is tucked into the hospital and now that we know there exists a mastermind behind Level Upper, I thought I'd plan up our next move. Does the Data Banks include brainwave patterns?"

"No, not really," she answered much as I expected. I just needed to make sure that the quest couldn't so easily be completed by pressing a couple of keys on a computer, and it wasn't.

"Okay, great. I get to play my favorite game of 'guess who's the murderer,'" I rubbed my hands, "So, Miss Uiharu, you're good at searching for information on the Banks, yes? Can you help us find the profiles of researchers who have recently filed for time on Tree Diagram and had their requests rejected?"

"How recent?"

"About two years."

She brought up the records quickly: "What for?"

"So I take it that Mikoto here didn't talk about the hypothesis?" That woman! I thought she would've talked about everything as if it were her idea already to give them a bit more time to process it.

"Oh, you meant the conjecture about the entire thing being orchestrated by someone who needs computing power? It's kind of ludicrous to begin with, don't you think? We've never found a way to 'network' brains together like computers. They're different, after all." Damn kid, trying to dismiss my theory without first taking a look at it! "Well, here's the list of people who requested access to Tree Diagram in the past two years… wait a minute."

The name "Kiyama Harumi" was repeated a few times on the list. A dozen times, in fact. I arched an eyebrow victoriously: "You were saying?"

"You're saying that that woman is the perpetrator?" Mikoto may be careless sometimes, but she wasn't dense. "But…"

"She seemed so nice?" I cut in. People could be wolves in sheep's clothing.

"W-well, I-I was going to say that she s-seems a bit off her knockers," Mikoto "corrected" herself, "but, yeah, what other evidence do you have?"

"I don't have any more evidence than this except that she's shown a dire need for computing power and she's… well, would you look at this?"

Kiyama Harumi was known to have worked in the AIM Analytic Research Center. It was an advanced research facility on the AIM fields that espers like Mikoto emanate, and I suppose its properties could have enough commonalities between espers that it—or a modulation of it produced by a certain brain wave pattern—could be used like a psychic TCP/IP protocol.

"These are circumstantial evidence at best, Mister Shimura," Uiharu bit into the word "mister" a little bit harder than usual as if she was straining to respect me as an upper classman. I expected that; accusing someone of a heinous crime based on circumstantial evidence was not professional behavior someone would expect from detectives.

But I was neither a detective nor did I care at all about having her respect. All I cared about was to resolve the incident. It wouldn't do to have Level Upper users wreaking havoc left and right, because the power balance within Academy City between espers, non-espers and the administration was already fragile enough to have someone like this Level Upper admin come in and smash it with a gigantic sledgehammer: "I know, I know, but do you have any more to go on? That thug didn't tell us much more than what we already know, that Level Upper boosts power levels and is available on the internet as a download to people who knew how."

She shut up really quickly. Our leads were vaporizing left and right and she knew it: "To just suspect Dr. Kiyama because she needed computing power and she did research related to Level Upper is stretching it a bit far, but…"

"We don't have better leads to go on, Uiharu," Mikoto chimed in. Her hugging of Uiharu from behind seemed to startle the girl with a flower tiara. "Let's just follow his lead for now. I'll be sure to punish him if it turns out to be fake."

"What are you gonna do, spank me?" I smirked.

"I'm gonna zap you."

"I'm shaking in my boots."

"Oh, I'll also get you a pair of knee-high leather boots with stiletto heels. And you'll have to wear it. With a dress."

"… Fine, fine. My leads are good. So, anyone mind if we head to Kiyama's office right now?"

* * *

Kiyama was in her office. The woman seemed to be the stereotype for a regular researcher, including her lack of knowledge in social norms and common sense. If the bags under her eyes were any indication, she suffered from a chronic lack of proper sleep. I wouldn't remove the possibility that she could be delirious due to sleep deprivation.

"So, what are you girls here to talk about?" My eyebrows twitched a little, but I decided to let that slide. "My schedule is kind of tight today."

"Doctor Kiyama, I would like to know why you have requested the use of Tree Diagram a dozen times in the past two years. What are you working on that would require the computing power of Tree Diagram?" I asked the question, while Mikoto and Uiharu stood behind me.

"As you know, Tree Diagram is useful for running powerful simulations. My project required a simulation of the human brain and the AIM emanations from it," She answered as plainly as she could be, while managing to avoid my eyes by pretending to read a document in front of her.

"Doctor, all of your requests was rejected by the administration. If your project is officially sanctioned and did require the use of Tree Diagram, then wouldn't they approve at least one out of twenty-three that you made in the past?" I knew that breaching this woman's defenses was not going to be easy. Picking the lock on a mind was, and remains, difficult, especially when the subject expected me to pick the lock.

"Am I a suspect in the Level Upper incident that you have been investigating, Miss… Harusaki, was it?"

Dodging my question, is she? Well! I was not about to have her divert her attention from me: "Doctor Kiyama, I asked you a question. Why do you think that the administration rejected all your requests to use Tree Diagram for an officially sanctioned project?"

"Maybe they were just using the supercomputer for more pressing matters," she muttered, "My project wasn't anything pressing."

The shift in her facial expression was interesting to say the least. She was quite frankly a bad liar, as socially awkward people tend to be. She believed none of the things she just said. But there was something more. I couldn't tell what that "something" was at the time, but she seemed to have a conviction of some sort, a personal determination that what she was doing was the right thing to do, even though it crossed the line somewhere. She was a believer in a righteous cause, someone with a fierce hatred toward the authorities. I could tell that it fuelled her actions to bludgeon the delicate power balance with a baseball bat.

That would not do. The power balance was all that kept Academy City from spiraling into an out-of-control civil war. Death and destruction notwithstanding, what would the other powers in the world do? The United States, China and Russia all have esper programs and they wanted to get their hands on Academy City's research and their staff, not to mention the things they would love to do to guinea pigs like us.

"I don't think so. I think you're hiding something from us. I think that you're actually in urgent need for computing power for some inexplicable reason that you're not telling us, and the authorities are stopping you because you're moving against one of their interests. Am I right?" I said while staring at her.

She never stared back and remained silent. Bull's eye.

"You can't get to Tree Diagram to run whatever you need to run, so you invented Level Upper and form a grid computing cluster with people's brains. You then hijack their brains and do whatever computation you would do, and disconnect them from your network till you're done. Or, that's what you think you'll do, isn't it?" I paced back and forth between her and a fuming Mikoto, "Smart plan, taking advantage of the weakened mental state of the Academy City's underprivileged. But you fail to realize the impact your plan has on the city, its inhabitants, and the potential consequences."

"Are you going to stop me?" She grumbled.

"Of course! We can't…" I held up a hand and Mikoto had to swallow her words.

"You think that it's as simple as to entice these people with more power, but things are much more complicated than that," I smiled. My hand was already around my pistol: "Yes, we're going to stop you. It's our job as hero and heroines, after all."

"Then, I suppose I have no choice but to take you three hostage and complete my work before I turn myself in to the authorities," She picked up a pistol from her desk drawer and aimed it at me, "because it's my job as the villainess. Isn't that right?"

Uiharu was visibly nervous from what I could see in her posture. She probably had seen the black silhouette of my pistol and thought there'd be a shootout, I figured. But Mikoto was unfazed: "You know who I am, right?"

"Misaka Mikoto, the third Level Five in the city, the Electro-Master. Of course I know who you are," she smirked. A pistol sure as hell wasn't going to injure Misaka in the least; she had a trump card up her sleeve. "But I suggest you come along. I'm the only one who can wake them up from the coma. If you don't want me to destroy the cure, then you should listen to what I say-!"

I drew and fired a shot at her computer monitor, putting a smoking hole through it. Even though the pistol was suppressed, the three women in the room all screamed at the loud squeak from it.

"What the hell are you doing Mister Shimura!?" Uiharu wailed as she clutched tight to my side.

I pointed my pistol at Kiyama's head. The room was so silent that the sound of the spent cartridge bouncing on the tiled floor was fairly audible.

"What… what did I say about coming along quietly?" Kiyama panted. Her hand trembled slightly; in that state, she would probably miss her shot, but at this range, I couldn't say for sure.

"You're not going to do it," my hand wasn't shaking. I knew that I could drop her with a couple of shots in center mass. The Mexican Standoff could go a lot of ways; I was hoping—and indeed, I was checking—that if there would be a peaceful resolution to this, one that would involve neither the authorities nor someone making a trip to the hospital.

There wasn't. Since the moment we decided to come here, there was nothing that I could do to bring about a peaceful solution. Her convictions—whatever it was—would prevent her from backing down easily, and whatever we could offer in exchange was too insignificant for her to accept. But what exactly did she want? What exactly did she need that would persuade her to give up?

"Just what do you know about me?" She asked. Her emotional defenses were crumbling, and she was on the verge of losing it.

I held Mikoto back with my arm. It was simply not the right moment to move: "I admit, I know very little about you, but I can see that you're not an evil person. If you were an evil megalomaniac, you'd have shot me already and use whatever trick that you have to subdue my companions here. And, if you were really that evil, you'd have spread Level Upper freely and without restrictions. It would cause widespread social unrest, the collapse of order as users of Level Upper destroy the society through unchecked ability use, and it would provide you with much better leverage in your negotiations with the administration even if you fail to use Level Upper as a computational network. You didn't. You did none of those things. You were not, and you remain, a good if misguided person."

"My studies, my experiments, my simulations; none of them will be interrupted," she seethed through her teeth, "not by the Administration, not by Anti-Skill, and certainly not by you."

"We're at an impasse, then." I dropped my arm, much to Mikoto's delight.

"The experiments with Level Upper must be stopped," I holstered my pistol and spoke over the crackling of Mikoto's power, "if we cannot get you to peacefully abandon your schemes…"

"We'll just have to beat you till you do!" Mikoto cut in as she launched a long nail at Kiyama. I grabbed Uiharu by the arms and shielded her from the blast of the nail's sonic boom as Kiyama pulled the trigger. The round grazed me on the back as I took cover.

The room then exploded. Tempered glass windows broke into a shower of harmless particles and rained outside. Her office was on the second floor and the surrounding areas were pretty empty, so fortunately, there were no casualties. Kiyama deflected the supersonic projectile with a strange shimmering barrier of some sort.

"Grab onto me!" I yelled as I hugged Uiharu tight.

"Eh? What are you…!"

"Tuck and roll!" If I didn't want to die, I had to jump out the window.

Why? Because the room exploded for real the moment my foot stepped on the window sill. Kiyama caused the explosion, I was pretty sure; Misaka wouldn't make such damaging moves with both Uiharu and I in close vicinity.

"What the hell!?" Misaka yelled in surprise. I hope she grabbed the sturdy metal desk and used it as a shield; that explosion wasn't anything to be taken lightly.

I was airborne for a very brief moment. The brightness of the sun blinded me for a split second before my vision returned. I could feel the debris and office supplies hitting me on the back; luckily nothing sharp hit me.

The loss of gravity was only for a brief moment as I felt the Earth take hold of my body once again. Uiharu was still in my embrace. She was surprisingly silent despite what just happened, but from the strength of her arms and the inability for her to let go, she was frightened to the core. Well, the only choice I had then was to take the fall like a man and accept that I might actually break an ankle. Uiharu was small, sure, but I couldn't exactly tuck and roll with another person's weight on me.

The landing hurt like a bitch. I could feel my right ankle dislocate when I landed on it. The resulting pain made me fall and roll in a really disgraceful manner, but I couldn't make physics my bitch like some people in this city could. I came to a stop under Uiharu, and I couldn't get up because my right ankle was completely busted for the time being.

"OW! FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK!" I swore. Civility, be damned; when I said it hurt like a bitch, it really, really hurt like a bitch. Well, I should be thankful that her office wasn't on the eighth floor or something, because without a parachute I'd more than likely be dead. Landing with a sprained ankle was the best outcome I could've hoped for.

Next time, check the damn decision tree for dead ends before I get myself involved in any shenanigans that went on in this cursed city; I made a mental note.

"Are you okay, Mister Shimura?" Uiharu was almost in tears, but she wouldn't let go of me.

"Do I look okay to you?" Civility be damned, indeed; I squeezed these words out between my clenched teeth. "Let go of me, and then I can do something about my damn ankle!"

"Yeah, okay…" She answered meekly. I knew my answers scared her and she was already terrified, but I wasn't thinking straight at the moment.

"Wait, what is this… I can't… my arms are locked…" She grunted and tried to separate herself from me, but I guess her muscles kind of gave up after getting frightened like that. With her on top of me, I couldn't exactly sit up and treat my ankle; it was swelling up like a large _daikon_, but I was sure that it wouldn't be as delicious in _oden_ soup.

Having nothing that I could do and having Uiharu continue to squirm on top of me to try and pull herself free, I had to turn my attention to the fight between Mikoto and Kiyama.

The metal desk was a mangled pile of steel after Mikoto threw it in Kiyama's face had it deflected and crushed. Kiyama appeared to utilize many different abilities all at once. She was certainly using Synchrotron as there were large explosions of aluminum cans left and right, mostly from the garbage cans around the building. Mikoto was having a rough time against her, even though she had the advantage of mobility.

I never would have thought that Mikoto of all people was the one being outgunned.

I had to do something, but my ankle prevented me from doing much. The good thing was that Uiharu had finally managed to remove herself from me. I collected myself, sat up against a tree, drew my pistol and aimed it at Kiyama, before I was reminded that if a hypersonic nail didn't do anything to her, then a 9mm bullet was definitely unlikely to make a difference.

"What are you doing, Mister Shimura? Put the pistol down! You can't shoot her!" Uiharu grabbed my wrist and forced me to lower my weapon. It wasn't because I couldn't shoot her; it was because with my shoddy marksmanship, I may end up hitting Misaka instead at this range.

"Call Anti-Skill, and get them here. We'll need both transport and some fire power against this woman." I resigned, holstering my pistol. I wouldn't want them to see it when they got on the scene. Mikoto was doing her best at keeping Kiyama in the vicinity and from going into the more populated areas. The building was being evacuated and the security guards were already on the scene, but they weren't sure what to do.

"Yeah, I've called them," Uiharu closed her cell phone. "What do I do now? I want to help!"

"Go to those security guards and use your status as Judgment to get them to help." Pathetic I was, lying there in a heap with a sprained ankle and couldn't do much. But then again, what could I do against Kiyama when even Mikoto was in trouble? My ability wasn't for combat. Perhaps I could have engineered the events to avoid a violent confrontation like this in the first place; even though I could predict my future, I could hardly change the past.

Uiharu quickly scurried off, her dark green armband fluttering as she moved. The security guards were also using pistols and Tasers; their weapons wouldn't do much good in my hands at this range. Two trucks full of Anti-Skill soldiers in riot gear arrived on the scene not long after. One of them was greeted with an I-beam ripped out of the building's support propelled to transonic speed; it rammed straight through the engine block and the armored driver's cabin. Thankfully Uiharu was far enough from the truck; the mess in the cabin would be too much for a girl like her to handle.

The Anti-Skill deployed with military precision and without panicking, even though their opponent was vastly more powerful than they were. The pattern of fire they released was impressive, indeed; the noise of gunfire drowned out whatever conversation I was trying to have with Uiharu as she helped me to the remaining Anti-Skill truck. She thought it would be safer for both her and me to stay behind the Anti-Skill soldiers. Riot shields would ordinarily be good cover against a mob, but against transonic steel beams? Not so safe. Even though Kiyama wasn't targeting them intentionally, the fight between her and Mikoto was causing plenty of collateral damage.

An Anti-Skill soldier got hit in the head by a flying piece of concrete. His visor helmet protected his skull from being ripped open, but the blunt trauma was still severe enough to knock him out cold. His weapon—a SIG SG551 carbine, by the way—slid into my hands. I had always wanted to get my hands on one of these, and lucky me: the half-transparent magazine was half-full and the gun itself came equipped with an EO Tech holographic sight.

"What are you doing, Mister Shimura?! You can't move…!" Uiharu was terrified that I was trying to stand up when I was simply trying to get into a kneeling position so that I can stabilize my firing stance.

"Relax, it's just a sprained ankle," I spared a glance at her before flipping the fire selector switch to semi-automatic. At the moment, the volume of full-auto fire from the Anti-Skill squad was still considerable, and I doubted my magazine would last a single second if I let it rip just like that.

Kiyama was surprisingly hard to acquire as a target even though she was not moving much at all. The fight between her and Mikoto was truly a fight of apocalyptic proportions; even to this day, I'm amazed by the amount of destruction from a cat fight. And looking back at the fight, Mikoto actually exercised quite a lot of restraint.

Long-ranged attack from her did not work against Kiyama. The woman's defense against projectiles was impressive; neither bullets nor Mikoto's metal nails went through her shield. Mikoto hurled a piece of steel-reinforced concrete at her. The projectile exploded into an impressive shower of concrete debris, and the steel cast aside.

Mikoto used her freedom of movement to its fullest, clinging onto the building's walls and dodging Kiyama's slow projectiles. She had to close in to strike an effective blow, but Kiyama's attacks were too fierce for her. Kiyama knew that she was the most important threat, too; she focused on Mikoto almost completely, ignoring the Anti-Skill squad by erecting some kind of a shield between her and them. Bullets simply glanced off of the shield and kicked up dust as they collided with the ground.

"Mister Shimura, stop, you can't handle a gun—!" The spent casing almost hit Uiharu in the face as I let off a shot. The kick of the 5.56mm cartridge was not as bad as I expected, partially because of the rifle's weight. The bullet was about as effective as I expected, but I just wanted to fire the rifle and see if it may help, anyway.

"Boy, what are you doing?! Put that down!" A fully-geared soldier who was directing fire sprinted up to me and tried to wrest the gun from my hand.

"Don't…! You should know better than trying to wrest my gun from me while I have my finger on the freaking trigger!" I let go without much resistance; someone was going to get shot in the back if I resisted.

"Gosh, you're that girl on Komoe's class!"

Damn it! Why the hell… wait. Did he say "Komoe"?

The guy had flowing locks and a completely feminine face. Wait, I recognized that face. She was Yomikawa Aiho the gym teacher. She was an Anti-Skill? But of course! The Anti-Skill was composed of teachers; there may be a large portion of mercenaries, but they all masquerade as "teachers" who didn't actually teach. This woman was different, though. Strict as she might be, she was actually not a bad teacher.

"Ma'am, I am certainly not a girl, and I can handle myself if not for the sprained ankle," I responded, holding up my hand, "if only we had a rocket launcher. Do we have a rocket launcher?"

"Wait, you're not thinking about…"

She seemed incredulous. It was obvious that bullets weren't working against Kiyama; was it so surprising that I was considering larger guns?

"Yeah. You think regular guns are going to work against her? It's not like you haven't been wasting hundreds of rounds just peppering the ground doing squat," I spat back at her, "Do we have a rocket launcher?"

"Um, yeah, yeah we do," she seemed flustered at my stern questioning. I couldn't help it; given what Mikoto was going through, and given the pain on my terribly sprained ankle, my mood couldn't be worse.

"Okay, great. Let's not talk about why you guys respond to an incident with a truck full of rocket launchers, or what you intend to do with them against civilians; can you grab a couple of tubes for me? Uiharu, you can help too."

Yomikawa had to have known that there was no time to argue, either against me or otherwise. She dashed to the back of the wrecked van, and pulled out two tubes of…

"SMAW. Impressive. How'd you get American hardware, anyway?" I smiled and gestured for one of the tubes, but Yomikawa simply brushed me off.

"Kids can't handle this!" She snapped before assuming a kneeling stance and aimed the tube at Kiyama. The reports of the spotting cartridges were lost in the storm of gunfire, but the sound of the rocket launch was unmistakable. I had to pull Uiharu out of the back blast zone and then shield my ears; the thing was too loud for my ears to withstand. And because it was so loud, Kiyama saw the threat coming. She slapped the rocket out of the way like swatting a bug out of the air; it exploded shortly after Kiyama was out of its effective blast zone.

"Damn it!" Yomikawa cursed: somehow I could hear her even when my ears were ringing from the noise.

She quickly disconnected the empty tube from the rear of the weapon and tried to plug in a new one. Her next shot was also going to be swatted out of the way like some nuisance. To hit Kiyama, it would all boil down to timing: the shot needed to be fired when she would be distracted. My ability would be able to predict such a time if the launcher was in my hand, but there was no way that she was going to hand me her launcher.

"Uiharu," I said to her ears, "can you go to the van and see if you can grab something similar to what she's holding?"

"What? You mean, you're going to use that?" Her voice was trembling a little bit before it trailed off. For a girl in her first fire fight, she was holding herself together fairly well.

"Yeah. Trust me when I say I can use it to help Mikoto beat that bitch. Keep your head down." I only hope that my smile would assure her as she dashed toward the wrecked van.

She came back a couple minutes later with an assembled launcher in hand. She almost stumbled and slipped on some loose bits of concrete, but she managed to regain her balance and deliver the launcher to me: "Is this what you asked for, Mister Shimura?"

"Oi, kid, put that back!" Yomikawa screamed. Her launcher, too, was ready to fire after a reload and she had already shouldered it.

"Shut up and hold your damn fire—!" The noise of the launch drowned out my words. It was as I figured; she wouldn't listen to whatever I say. Of course, Kiyama slapped the rocket out of the way again, but this time she redirected the rocket against Mikoto. Though Mikoto detonated it prematurely with a bolt of lightning, it distracted her enough that Kiyama's follow-up attack shoved her through the building.

"Stop! Stop!" Uiharu wrestled Yomikawa for the launcher. "You're going to hit Miss Misaka! Stop firing!"

Yomikawa was distracted. Mikoto was sent through several walls; I assumed that she couldn't move for a moment. Kiyama turned her attention toward the Anti-Skill squad, who were slowly but surely running out of ammunition in their futile attempt to stop her with rifle bullets.

"GET DOWN!" I screamed as Kiyama let out a huge air blast from her palm. The shockwave was probably on par with a bomb; Yomikawa had to shield Uiharu from the blast. Soldiers who were too slow to take cover behind their riot shields were blown high into the air; some others had their riot shields ripped from their hands.

Kiyama had an annoying smirk on her face. It was the same smirk as the one Mr. Barcode had, the smirk of a powerful person looking down on their powerless prey. In this case, it was us: the Anti-Skill soldiers, Uiharu, and me.

It irked the hell out of me.

"KICK HER ASS!" I yelled as I prepped the launcher. A beam of steel-reinforced concrete answered my call by flying straight at Kiyama. Of course, she deflected the beam, but I could tell that it took her by surprise; the idea that Mikoto could so quickly make another move apparently went without consideration in her mind.

This was the first tactical mistake that she'd make. It won't be her last.

Mikoto took her head-on with whips of sand in hand, glued together through electromagnetic attraction. Kiyama had to fend her off, and Mikoto intentionally drew Kiyama's attention away from the Anti-Skill and us. It was the only natural thing to do, because Anti-Skills needed to regroup and reorganize. Yomikawa had already ordered rocket launchers and extra ammunition to be distributed to the remaining soldiers; if they would follow my lead, the volley of rockets would certainly at least scratch her seemingly impregnable defenses.

"Boy, let go of the launcher!" Yomikawa hollered loudly, "We don't even have enough for the soldiers! There's no way you can operate it!"

I ignored her and shouldered the launcher, curling my finger around the trigger. She was going to wrestle with me again for the launcher—being the brash woman that she was—but Uiharu stopped her by clinging onto her waist.

Is it not time yet? Is it not time yet?! I asked the question again and again. My ability remained silent, until Mikoto leaped into the air and began her descent on Kiyama.

Now!

"Back blast clear!" I pulled the trigger without firing the spotting rounds and without giving any regard to whoever might be behind me. They should have recognized that I was going to fire the missile, and they should have ducked. Even Uiharu should have known that standing directly behind a rocket launcher would be incredibly dangerous after the first time I pulled her from the back blast zone.

The rocket screamed for Kiyama's life. She was too busy focusing her attention on Mikoto to see the rocket, and when she did see, whatever flimsy defense that she could erect was immediately breached by the rocket's high-explosive warhead. It blasted a huge chunk from the piece of loose concrete she floated as a shield, knocked her off her footing and induced her first audible scream of pain.

"You… hit her!" Yomikawa's jaw almost hit the floor. It was seriously a pity when nobody in the city knew my somewhat powerful precognitive capabilities; I thought the lack of attention I received from research institutions was worth the trouble of keeping it hidden, but if I would encounter these situations more and more, I should reconsider my choice.

"Save your incredulity for later," I snapped, quickly pulling the launcher off of my shoulder, "and help me reload this. You got more ammo, right? We might need more."

"Okay," she grabbed my launcher and twisted the empty cartridge off of the back, before quickly slamming a new one in with no regard of the launcher's integrity.

But I didn't need a second shot immediately. Misaka shielded herself from the blast by forming her sand whips into a barrier. She didn't need to adjust her stance; because Kiyama stumbled, Mikoto was able to tackle her directly, giving her the perfect opportunity to strike.

"Calm… yourself… down!" The intensity of the zapping that ensued could rival the power of an entire thunderstorm. Thankfully, she took the care not to fry the entire city's power grid, but she was pretty pissed.

And I would have guess, that attack marked the end of the battle. There wasn't anything dramatic, as it should be…

But I spoke too early like my ability foretold. The body of the unconscious Kiyama started convulsing in Mikoto's embrace. Threads of ethereal energy converged into a grotesquely organic tumor floating quite some distance above Mikoto; it pulsed as if it had a heart, and quickly grew into the shape of an under-developed fetus.

"What… what the hell is that!?" I couldn't blame Yomikawa for being mortified; it was one of the most disturbing things that I had seen up to that point in my life.

And then it let out one of its cries and even Mikoto was stunned. It was eerily similar to a baby's cry, but carried with it was so much… well, I didn't know how to describe it, just that for any person with some empathy left, it was incredibly difficult to not stop and wonder just what the hell that thing was.

"Fire! Fire!" Yomikawa finally collected herself enough to order her men to attack it, and of course, bullets didn't work against it; in the countless number of incidents that I have helped resolve in Academy City, only a handful were resolved through the appropriate application of bullets. Sometimes I had to wonder, if Robert Oppenheimer knew that modern science can create deviations thousands of times more destructive than nuclear weapons, would he still have said that he had become death?

Mikoto used the opportunity that the beast was distracted to drag Kiyama's body to us. Her Tokiwadai uniform was ripped in several places: half of her skirt was missing, and there was a long bloody gash on her back. Kiyama did a number on her, but it was not yet time for her to rest.

"Thanks for helping to take her down, Ryou," she had a small smile on her face when she rubbed her sweat off of her forehead, "now, what do we do?"

To be honest, I had no idea. The creature was as foreign to me as, say, the alien in Area 51. Actually, it was a bad comparison because I had seen what was believed to be aliens on movies and TV. This thing was completely in another realm.

"I don't know what exactly it is. Pouring on firepower seemed to not have as much an effect as Yomikawa there would expect." The creature was growing bigger as we spoke. Yomikawa's squad poured as much lead as they could into it, but it seemed to cause only superficial damage. "Well, it would suggest that either it's completely immortal and can regenerate from the tiniest amount of itself, or that it has a core. But then it raises another question of where it's drawing its power to regenerate itself…"

A huge explosion interrupted my train of thought as scalding liquid came raining down on us. Yomikawa had the good sense of grabbing a riot shield and protecting us from the rain of boiling water, but whatever splashed on me still hurt. Mikoto electrolyzed some ice projectiles the monster threw at us and blew them apart by causing the resulting hydrogen to violently combust.

"Mikoto," I glanced at the rocket launcher. During times like these, things such as these technological innovations to make mankind slaughter each other much more efficiently remained useless as they were. The appearance of espers—especially Level 5 espers such as Mikoto—completely destroyed military thinking for the past two millennia. Tactical or even strategic objectives can be taken with one Level 5 esper all by themselves, without much support at all. Logistics then would become a joke as all the supply line needed to do was to pack boxed lunch for them. The role of a single, individual soldier would be reduced to one question and one question only:

Are you a powerful esper?

I am not. But thankfully, Mikoto was.

"Yes?" She tilted her head and stared at me.

"Maybe it's time for you to stop holding back," I suggested. "I don't know what it is or what's powering it, but we have to destroy it before it can hurt more people."

"But we don't know what the consequence of killing this thing is!" Strangely, she objected, "I mean, what if killing this thing results in the death of everyone who's used Level Upper? That can be hundreds or even thousands of people!"

"Ten thousand, to be exact…" Kiyama woke up. Usually a Taser shock would knock a person like her out cold for at least a couple of hours, but I guess Mikoto really had a soft spot for her.

But, that was irrelevant. Ten thousand wasn't exactly a small number, but compared to the population of Academy City it was still not that significant. Besides, these kids made their choices; they should be required to carry the consequences, even if said consequence was the loss of their life.

"What's going to happen when we destroy this thing?"

"I don't know," Kiyama chuckled, "I never anticipated the gestalt AIM fields of the network to form such a monstrosity. I do have a program that could reverse the effect of Level Upper, but…"

Oh, things just kept getting better and better. The USB stick she pulled out of her pants pocket had its casing partially melted and its insides completely destroyed thanks to Mikoto's overzealous electrocution.

"You said that this thing is the… concentration of the Level Upper network's AIM field. Then, that means that it'll keep regenerating as long as the network's intact," I recalled without even bothering to hide my feelings of dread, "And given that we have no way to currently destroy the Level Upper network…"

"Is it hopeless then…? Are we all going to die here?" Uiharu was on the verge of tears.

"I'm not going down without a fight." Classic Mikoto. She stood up with a steel nail in her hand, "Ryou, can you tell me what I should do?"

"Keep your cell phone on, and listen to my instructions," I dialed her number and clipped on my headset, "follow them to the letter. I'm your tactical support. And whatever you do, whatever he does, never, ever, ever, fire without my approval."

"Why is that?"

"I think there's more to this creature than meets the eye," I smiled. It wasn't exactly a lie; this thing would regenerate and become larger every time something damages it, so it'd be best if we could destroy it with one shot. "Besides, have I ever been wrong?"

"Yeah, okay. I'll trust you on this one." After Mikoto dashed into the thick of battle again, I had Yomikawa order the Anti-Skill soldiers to cease fire at the creature. By then, it was already as tall as six meters and quite powerful; the neon-green tendrils on its back extended into the ground, forming into something like primitive angel wings.

How disgusting.

"All right, what do I do? I need to attract its attention, right?"

I closed my eyes. At that moment, I only required life support, my hearing and my voice; and thus, I relinquished all other functions to my ability, amplifying it further. I have to say, even to this day, giving up my senses and bodily functions was a strange experience. I mean, if I wasn't careful, I could even give up control of my bowels and… yeah, you get the picture.

Still, the feeling of the world floating away after I give them up was pretty strange. I remember my head landing on Uiharu's lap as I gave away my skeletal muscles everywhere in the body but on my face and neck, before even the feeling of touch faded. Her voice of concern was further disembodied as scents of gunpowder and fire disappeared from my nostrils and my eyes went blank.

"I'm okay, Uiharu," I assured her. Using my ability in public wasn't the best option, but it was the only option. "Now, Mikoto, listen well because I'm only going to say this once. We're going to end this with one strike, but to attract its attention you must attack it. Hold back on these attacks; hit it enough so that it'll turn its attention to you, but not so much that it'd grow too big."

"I'll leave the control to you!" That was her answer. It was a good enough answer.

"All right." The decision tree unfolded in front of me in iridescent color. Thousands of choices were offered on each node, with each choice extending to a node on the next level. Even then, I could only see three steps into the tree, because there were way too many choices for each node.

This fight would push my ability to the limits.

"All right, pick up that piece of concrete on your left, the really big chunk, and hurl it at your target," I said. It was to set up for an attack a couple moves later. There was a loud collision, and then the monster howled in pain. Mikoto has obtained his attention for the moment.

"Come and get me, you fat ugly bitch!" Mikoto taunted.

"It doesn't understand your taunts," I continued as the decision tree moved down a level. Many of these options were colored blood red; those were the ones that I absolutely should not take because they would lead to certain death. Ruling those out would be pretty quick, but I wondered how the decision tree was colored as such if I could only see seven steps into the future.

"Would you hurry it up please? I have its attention, now what!?" Loud crashes came both through the headset and the other ear. I shut off the other ear; it was useless in the current situation, and I could gain a little more clarity on the fourth option.

"Stay alive. Dodge to the right!" With a grunt and a loud crash, I assumed Mikoto made a successful evasion, so I issued another order: "Circle around it so that it's always looking at you out its peripheral vision!"

"Got it!" Several more loud bangs came through the headset.

Then it came to the actual attack that I set up a couple moments earlier: "Pick up all the pieces of steel-reinforced concrete on the ground and hurl it at him! Quick, fast, and don't pack too much punch into them!"

"Here goes!" There was a crackle, and there was a string of thuds. The creature roared again; Mikoto's attacks didn't hurt him as much, but she was an incredibly frustrating target: slippery as an eel on escape, and painful as a wasp on attack.

"Duck and roll, right side!"

"C'mon!" Mikoto avoided that sweeping strike. She huffed through the headset; she had to be pretty exhausted, having kept the monster busy and herself directly in harm's way for that long. "I need to finish this ASAP!"

"Maybe you should come to the gym with me once in a while."

"SHUT UP! Are you suggesting that I'm fat!?" Damn it; I wish I could see her pout.

"Maneuver to the top of the building! Gutter pipe to the left!"

"You're asking me to go through it!?"

"Go around it, stupid! Sprint to the roof along the damn gutter pipe with your power! You can do that, right?"

"Who the _hell_ do you think I am!?" She did, like I knew she would. It was a precarious position for her to be in. Even though she was then level with the monster's head, her footing wasn't that secure; if the creature decided to swipe at the bottom of the building, Mikoto would lose her footing and be buried in a mass of mangled steel and concrete.

But no, that wouldn't happen if we acted quickly enough: "Find a large piece of steel! Largest you could find!"

"What for?"

"Your bullet!"

"I got it! Is this large enough?" Crashes and screeches flooded the headpiece as Mikoto yelled back. The decision tree was shifting every second, eliminating and adding choices as time trickled by.

"That'll work! Aim carefully! A bit to the right! A bit up!" I adjusted her aim according to the shifting decision tree. "You got it! Now, blow it to hell! Don't hold back! Do it like one of them manga leads!"

"Hell, yeah! Let's blow this pop stand!"

Victory was assured. I opened my eyes and regained my senses; there was no reason to keep them suppressed any longer. The blinding light of a sinking sun was overpowered by the light from Misaka's rail gun. She propelled a couple hundred kilograms of mangled steel at near reentry speeds. The steel itself melted into a more aerodynamic shape, a stream of molten metal screaming for the creature's life. The stream cut open its head like it was made of wet tissue paper, and struck the prism-shaped core inside it. The core, unable to withstand such a vicious assault, shattered into little pieces as it flew out of the creature's head. The rest of the massive creature quickly disintegrated after that; without the core to anchor the power of the AIM field, it cannot maintain its shape.

"So that's… the power of a Level 5 Esper…" Kiyama breathed. She had no idea how much Misaka held back in the fight against her; even the shock that stunned her was meek in comparison.

"Well, doctor… I'd say you have work to do," I smiled at her before clenching my teeth. The adrenaline rush has passed; the pain returned along with the exhaustion that seeped into every pore of my body.

Mikoto, too, was exhausted; such a shot was simply not easily done even for a Level 5. The amount of kinetic energy in that shot was probably comparable to a couple hundred tons of TNT, in the yield range of a small nuclear weapon.

"You did well, Sparky," I whispered into the headset, smiling despite having paramedics trying to hoist me into a stretcher, "you did real well."

"If the kids don't wake up, I'm going to find a metric ton of steel and shove it up your ass."

"Like I said, have I ever been wrong?"

"Damn you, you know-it-all."

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

Well, well, well, another chapter. The last section is about the longest section I've ever written. Too bad Ryou had to ditch his eyesights; it would have been one of the most epic fight scenes he had witnessed in his life.

Hope you like it! Tell me what you think! Next Chapter, we meet the Sisters!


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